Albion College Education Department
Digital Portfolio Project
The Chronicles of Technology Aided Teaching
What is a digital portfolio?
As an education student at Albion College, you will compile a digital portfolio which will convey the essence of "what you are all about" to a prospective employer. This portfolio will ultimately reside on a CD-ROM which you can loan or give out. As such, the CD-ROM should be wholly self-supporting in that every application or file that is needed is already loaded. All of the software and hardware tools that you will need to create a digital portfolio will be maintained in the Ferguson Center computer lab.
A portfolio is a focused presentation to a prospective employer of one's professional knowledge, experiences, and abilities. A pre-service teacher (commonly called a student teacher) selects important artifacts, the very best and clearest evidences of their growth and learning, to include in a portfolio. Such artifacts can include: a resume and philosophy of teaching; lesson plans and implementations of classroom activities; sample works of their own students; research papers and essays which they have written; video of their classroom teaching; evaluations and letters of commendation about their aptitude with pedagogy or content knowledge; anecdotal records about students or classroom management strategies; or awards of distinction. It is focused because specific skills and dispositions related to teaching are delineated; for example, one can include specific state or national standards for teacher preparation with corresponding evidence of mastery of those standards. Besides educators, professionals in other fields such as entertainment and the fine arts use portfolios.
A digital portfolio encapsulates all of the above into a digital format, and is stored and distributed on digital (computer-based) media such as a hard disk, a compact disc (CD-RW: you can read and write over many times; CD-R: you write on it once and read it many times; CD-ROM: you can't write at all, but you can read it over and over), a digital video disc (DVD-ROM), a removable cartridge such as Zip®, Imation®, or Orb®, or the world-wide web. A digital portfolio is self-guiding, meaning that the author uses computer software to structure the presentation so that a reader can easily navigate and understand what is present. For example, you may construct a web-based portfolio and assume that the reader knows how to traverse from page to page via links. More importantly, always provide the reader with with a sense of where he/she "is" at any given time - why the information on a page is important, where they can choose to go next, and how to access ancillary documents. The portfolio is also self-contained, so that all the hardware and software that the reader needs to install and view the portfolio is clearly defined and/or included on the media. Most importantly it integrates text, graphics, video, audio and other formats to accurately convey the big picture, a portrait of the person as a teacher.
The idea is that your digital portfolio is an artifact that you can send ahead to a school or leave behind at an interview. Submitting an artifact such as this will also make a very clear statement about your ability to utilize academic technology. The total cost to you will be less than $100, depending on how ambitious you wish to be (or how many times you goof up ...). You would be wise to have two master copies of your work (in case something happens to one), and then all the CD-Rs that you think you will need. 2.2 GB Orb cartridges cost about $30; 650 MB CD-RW discs cost about $20; 100 MB Zip or 120 MB Imation cartridges are less than that, and CD-Rs only cost a dollar or two.
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