online portfolios for EE | eePRO @ NAAEE
eePRO

The home of environmental education professional development

online portfolios for EE

Thu, 2017-05-25 15:03

Has anyone come across a good setup for environmental educators to build online portfolios? In an (increasingly confusing) age of competency based education, badges, certifications, and micro-credentials, is there a good way for environmental education students and professionals to build an online portfolio that collects their achievements, shareable work, etc.? Academia.edu and its ilk focus more on researchers, and Livetext and similar setups are pricey and seem geared more to accreditation than personal use. Any ideas or experience out there? Is this something NAAEE should think about developing?

Fri, 2017-05-26 11:36

Bryan,

I have seen multiple programs used to create portfolios for students at the college level. Depending on the program and the department's interest/investment of time and money some options include:
Handshake (www.joinhandshake.com) and Foliotek (www.foliotek.com). Handshake has many features similar to LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). Foliotek allows institutions to set up a framework for students to create portfolios and then allows the institution to download files for different groups to create reports or
or for evaluation.
A free option is also using something like Google Sites while keeping access to the site restricted to those who need to see the portfolio.
If NAAEE were to look at some of the features from these different sites that are potentially useful to developing an EE portfolio, then I believe adding these features to eePRO would not be too hard (at the right price for our site developers).

Tue, 2017-05-30 09:38

Thanks for the suggestions, James. Colorado is considering a move toward online portfolios for certification. We have received several via Google Sites. Haiku learning and Blackboard Coursesites also have portfolio functionality. Haiku is more user-friendly.

Tue, 2017-06-06 07:18

We require portfolios for our Outdoor Education graduates. Many of them have moved to creating web sites for themselves through places like Squarespace. The college also has access to an online free program called Mahara, that provides a good place for document storage. It is not as "flashy" as what a student can create on Squarespace, but a student can store a lot of information on Mahara and make it accessible to others outside of the college.