Student Digital Portfolios
Every student with gifts and talents should have a collection of personal bests. Before computers, this may have been a shopping bag full of photo albums, faded construction-paper artwork, and wrinkled handwritten or typed essays from elementary, middle, and high school. Digital classrooms now make it easy to create, revise, and share artifacts to show a student's growing skills and depth of thinking.
At their most basic level portfolios can simply be a storage strategy. Deciding to create a new folder in Google Drive and only keeping your best work (with descriptive titles) in it is the first step in keeping a portfolio.
Portfolios can also support student-led family conferences to get feedback from parents, teachers, and classmates. This cultivates habits of lifelong learning by promoting reflection on how to share lasting and visible signs of what we learn and how we learned it with a wider audience.
As students prepare for middle-school magnets or high-school college-prep classes, a portfolio will serve as a showcase to tell the story of who they are, where they are headed, and how they will get there.
At their most basic level portfolios can simply be a storage strategy. Deciding to create a new folder in Google Drive and only keeping your best work (with descriptive titles) in it is the first step in keeping a portfolio.
Portfolios can also support student-led family conferences to get feedback from parents, teachers, and classmates. This cultivates habits of lifelong learning by promoting reflection on how to share lasting and visible signs of what we learn and how we learned it with a wider audience.
As students prepare for middle-school magnets or high-school college-prep classes, a portfolio will serve as a showcase to tell the story of who they are, where they are headed, and how they will get there.