Using Electronic Portfolios to Make Learning Public

Abstract

Electronic portfolio technology can be used in different contexts to create classroom communities in which everyone, not just the teacher, cares about each student's learning. The authors describe how students in an urban middle school, undergraduate teacher preparation program, and graduate leadership program used an electronic bulletin board and portfolio process to make all of their work public. In these classrooms, student work was not simply handed in to the teacher, graded, and quickly forgotten.The article also reports three preliminary findings: First, students at every level were able to share their work. Second, students who had little experience in giving one another feedback learned to reflect on one another's work, share ideas, build on those ideas, and use the feedback to leverage further learning. Third, the electronic portfolio process encouraged students to generate and focus on ideas that were personally compelling. The middle school students became deeply interested in exploring and reading and writing about community issues, and both the undergraduate and graduate students used the feedback to learn about and change important aspects of their own practice.