Beginner Notes about E-Portfolio Tools

As technology becomes more integrated into people’s work-lives, more and more people are learning to communicate and work together using these technologies. Co-workers communicate with one another via e-mail; work teams achieve their goals as a virtual staff, rather than living and working face-to-face; and conferences take place in cyberspace. The question is ,according on above, how we have to teach our students, on which elements or tools we should concentrate our focus? One of the most important components of constructivist learning is to encourage ownership in learning. Students need to be able to manage their own learning experiences. Many opponents of constructivism argue that this is a big weakness in the theory (Driscoll, 2000, p. 388-389). Many students are not ready or able to take charge of their own learning. Frequently, students must be assisted in this management, the Google Site, Blogger, Epsilen or any other types of E-portfolios can be a tremendous aid in moving them to make better judgments in the classroom. Especially in my view E-portfolios, along with teacher guidance, help students plan and organize their work. Quite often, when students see the system working, they become better learners because the work has more meaning for them. Reflection, a major part in the implementation of portfolios, plays a large role in this move towards independence.
I was already pretty familiar with many of the Google tools but the critical piece that I was missing was how easy it was to SHARE with others. My experience in Google Sites started about 2 year ago, and now I can say it’s one of my favorite and even necessary tools in my teaching practice. I create documents/handouts for students all the time and post them to my class website. However, it sure would be nice to be able to upload and then publish pdf files. As I'm sure many teachers would agree, we tend to create graphic- heavy organizers and handouts. Google docs simply can't handle the formatting to do these effectively, especially when size became as a big issue. Being able to upload bigger size pdfs would be extremely useful, e.g. recently I had tried Adobe Acrobat Version 9 and it is great format for the teaching files, but only small size or very limited options could be uploaded in Google Documents. That’s why it will be great if Google developers give us (teachers) more spaces and more abilities for uploading more teaching materials in different formats.
So what I’m looking for when I used Google Site, Blogger or any other same type of tools in order to process my web portfolios? Basically it’s a lifelong portfolio for faculty, students, professionals and alumni. Free E-Portfolio accounts must be available to all registered students and faculty of colleges and universities who have electronic addresses. Best of all, an E-portfolio can be created in minutes and used throughout one’s academic career, during professional life — even into retirement presented in one or more languages. An E-Portfolio account must be able to:
• Produce a robust personal E-Portfolio Web site, complete with profile, resume, photos and video.
• Showcase scholarly work and other documents in a wide range of formats including personal reflections.
• Upload, store and share files/objects.
• Assign and manage privacy settings for personal information, objects and documents.
• Access online courses and trainings using the Google, Blogger, Yahoo, Epsilen Global Learning System (GLS) coursewares.
• E-Portfolio follows you into the course.
One of my favorite part in Technology Facilitation Standards is a Planning and Designing Learning, which is exactly reflect on the E-Portfolio’s issue; “Identify and locate technology resources and evaluate them for accuracy and suitability.
Candidates:
1. Assist teachers as they identify and locate technology resources and evaluate them for accuracy and suitability based on district and state standards.
2. Model technology integration using resources that reflect content standards.”
It is very important identify and locate resources for our students, give them effective direction in their way to success, because of main point of any educational sources it’s an application.
Here is how to Google Tools connect each other in educational portfolios context, I think it will be interesting to have a look how it work.
In the following image you can see; how E-Portfolio is working if you created them in the Google System: