Effective practice with e-portfolio

Electronics portfolios: Engaged students create multimedia-rich artifacts

  As I’ve been taking the course “Content-based approach to writing,” I have interest in how to make my students to write continuously in English. As I read through the articles “Electronic portfolio: Engaged students create multimedia-rich artifacts” and “Effective practice with E-portfolio,” I’ve got an idea that I can use in my class. Before reading these articles, I regarded e-portfolio as just writing their learning log and capturing some video files, photographs, and hypertext links. I thought that e-portfolio is convenient means for students to keep their records online and to keep their resources found via the Internet easily. E-portfolio absolutely has these characteristics, but they are not the only advantages it has. Through using e-portfolio, teachers can give feedback to their students any time anywhere if they can use the Internet, which can encourage students to improve their works in a continuous and progressive way. Students’ classmates as well as teachers can give feedback one another through the Internet, making all students participating in the online conversation enhance their own works through other friends’ comments. In addition, e-portfolio doesn’t just include written form but also many various forms or dimensions regarding their assignments or their learning goals. While taking their courses, students can make any style of e-portfolio such as artifacts, paintings, etc. Therefore, even students who have difficulty writing can make their own types of e-portfolio. E-portfolio is not the same as learning log, but I think I can start to let my students write their learning logs in the written forms or in any other forms that they feel easy and then let them move their learning log to online e-portfolio using their blogs and make and keep their e-portfolio whenever they’d like to do. Students can easily have access to the Internet, so I think it’s more easy and convenient to do their e-portfolio online than do the portfolio on the paper. Furthermore, I came across “flipped classroom” to my mind when I read through these articles. Students study what they have to study before the class, and using e-portfolio, they can ask questions to their classmates and teachers, which can promote the real learning and learning process in the class.