5 Benefits of Creating an ePortfolio with your Students

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What is an ePortfolio

An electronic portfolio (ePortfolio) is a purposeful collection of student work, lessons, imagery and multimedia. It showcases students’ learning progression, achievements, and highlights what they can achieve. 

Almost every day, teachers share specific lessons with your students: as homework, as revision material, or in preparation for tests. Developing ePortfolios enables you to help students to get organised by taking their learning and their future into their own hands.

Want to know more? Check out this example of a student-led portfolio.

Benefits of Creating an ePortfolio for Students & Schools

With an ePortfolio, students can reflect on what they learned, how they learned it, and how much they learned. An excellent description is offered by Paulson, Paulson and Meyer, who write: “a portfolio is a laboratory where students construct meaning from their accumulated experience”. 

1. ePortfolios can help students facilitate, document and archive their own learning. They can become a learning tool to clarify students’ educational goals, integrate and consolidate their learning through reflection, and showcase their achievements to potential future employers. 

2. Schools could implement a subject-specific ePortfolio or one that’s used across multiple years and/or subjects. Based on your students’ needs and wishes, teachers can decide what kind of portfolio to create, and what to showcase within it. An ePortfolio is easy to implement, flexible, and customisable.

3. It could be also interesting for your students to use such a portfolio for career orientation and guidance purposes. They could insert documents, examples of their works, and insight relevant for their future study or career. 

An ePortfolio represents the perfect conversation starter during student-led conferences. Students can show and explain their study or career choices to their parents or caregivers, guiding them through their decisions with targeted examples. It empowers students to take charge of their future.

4. ePortfolios also empower schools as they easily function as a tool for schools to evaluate programme effectiveness. They can also be a useful way to organise and assess what students gained from the programme of study. 

5. If you are currently working with paper portfolios, moving into the digital realm is a natural progression. Technology makes the maintenance of portfolios easier. If you have not started with portfolios yet, it might be easier for you and your students to work directly with a digital portfolio.

How to Create an ePortfolio with your Students

It is nice to have both words and visuals in a portfolio. In LessonUp you can do so by adding photo questions. Your students could upload screenshots of their assignments, examples of their work and exercises as interactive slides. Furthermore, you could add some polls to showcase your students’ opinion on relevant topics.

Pictures, videos and audio recordings can also be part of it, if relevant. Once created, share the portfolio with your students through your class, and via your lesson modules. By doing so, you make sure that you and your students always have access to it, and can easily customise it & add slides to it if needed.

To find out how LessonUp’s ePortfolios could help your school and to request a free demo, visit their EdTech Impact profile .