Digital Portfolios

 Digital portfolios are tools that teachers and students can use to keep a record of work that they have completed. They can be used to show growth, or they can be a showcase of the student's best work. They are certainly a wonderful tool for students in elementary school antd even high school to catalog their growth. I also think that eportfolios could be very useful for students in the creative arts at any level. I personally don't feel that nature f my course lends itself to the use of an eportfolio. My students are learning technology skills that they will use through out their life, but there really aren't any products the create in my course that they could use for an eportfolio.

 Eportfolios are particularly well suited for an online learning environment since work must already be submitted in a digital format. It would be a simple matter for the teacher to help the student to select an eportfolio tool to use and direct which pieces of their work should be included. I think the problem for an online student might be to limit the work that it is included. It would be tempting to just put all work in an eportfolio, which wouldn't necessarily serve the desired purpose.

One area that I feel eportfolios would be particularly useful are for people who are aspiring to enter the workforce. As someone who is hoping to work as an instructional designer in an online environment, a digital portfolio will be a great tool for me to showcase what I am learning in my master's degree program. At the moment I am strongly considering using this blog as my eportfolio for the program. It gives me a chance not only to share learning objects that I have created, but also to discuss the process that I went through to develop them and the learning that took place as well. At the very least I will be using this blog to share things that I have created when I create them. As a part of this class I had the opportunity to begin using html to design web pages. It was something that I really enjoyed doing and would love to be able to design and create my own website for showing off my work. Unfortunately there isn't time for that at the moment, but it is definitely something that I intend to pursue.