The Portfolio Community of Practice

Choosing the Right Software for your ePortfolio

If you decide to start an ePortfolio, you might be asking yourself “Where do I start?” But before you hit the internet search for software that will publish your portfolio information electronically, you might want to consider what your particular purposes are for your ePortfolio. EPortfolios serve different purposes depending on the author’s objectives. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you want your portfolio to be a finished presentation or do you want it to be interactive and dynamic?

Is your portfolio primarily for employment purposes or do you want to use it to document your own learning processes?

What kinds of artifacts will you present? (i.e videos, photographs, pdfs)

Will your portfolio be public or private?

Your answers to these questions will allow you to choose the publishing tools that best suit your ePortfolio needs. Now you can decide if you want to use a static service such as an iWebfolio, an interactive blog such as Edublogs, or a collaborative service such as a wiki.

For more information on the various publishing services available, you can check out Helen Barrett’s website. Helen Barrett has done an extensive 4-year study on the features of various ePortfolio software, complete with personal reflections on each service.

Freefolio?

In order to move away from institutional definitions of what learning represents in an e-Portfolio, Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink have created Freefolio to facilitate alternative reflections on learning. Freefolio is a less rigid version of the traditional e-Portfolio, which tends to focus on particular sectors in education and restrict the ways in which a portfolio can be represented, according to the authors. The system has been tagged the social e-Portfolio because it is open source – created through online collaboration and easily extendable.

Visit the Pontydysgu blog to learn more or go straight to the Freefolio demo website.