Creating ePortfolios with Ease

Throughout a student’s school career, we support the development of products that reflect their learning – their drawings, stories, research papers or perhaps photographs of work. Saving that work over time, we begin to see the development of the student as a learner. Putting all of that work together becomes a student’s portfolio – a look at their progress as learners across time.  While there are many tools to help students create their own portfolios, we’ll focus on the use of Evernote.

Why use a Portfolio in a classroom?

• Encourage self-directed learning.
• Enlarge the view of what is learned.
• Foster learning about learning – *metacognition*
• Demonstrate progress toward identified outcomes.
• Create an intersection for instruction and assessment.
• Provide a way for students to value themselves as learners.
• Offer opportunities for peer-supported growth.
• Feed up, Feedback, Feed Forward

As we strive to become facilitators of learning in our classrooms we will need to take Susan Brookhart’s thoughts into consideration.  One of the original reasons portfolios were touted, and one of their biggest assets was to “support development of student self-regulation, skills at asking questions, evaluation, and making decisions about next steps.”  Let’s encourage our students to enhance these skills, increasing their ability to direct their own learning. One tool that can help us with this is Evernote.

Why should you use Evernote for an ePortfolio?
It’s free!  Evernote can be accessed by any web enabled device including your iPad, smart phone, and PC.  Creating notebooks will allow you to categorize and organize your notes.  Tagging each note will make it searchable.  Evernote will also allow you to upload images, email your notes, import PDFs, and clip web pages.  Mr Van Nood’s classroom  in Portland, Oregon is one example of ePortfolios in action that was featured in Education Week last year.

As SMART Notebook users, teacher will find one more great reason to use Evernote.
You can export Notebook pages as PDF and import them to Evernote. When a student in your class completes an assignment from one of the pages of your dynamic interactive Notebook lesson, have that student export the page as a PDF and import it to Evernote.  Tag it appropriately and student work can be saved and accessed from anywhere at any time.  Pretty neat!

How is your class using a Portfolio or an ePortfolio?  Please share your experiences with us.

Thanks to John Crotty, guest blogger for this article.