Creating
the Working Portfolio
A Case Study of
a Professional
Portfolio
By Helen Barrett
As
a faculty member in the School of Education at the
University of
Alaska Anchorage, I am required to develop a portfolio
that demonstrates
my capabilities in teaching, research, and service. In
fall 1997,
I developed a comprehensive teaching portfolio using Adobe
Acrobat.
I found that the best storage medium for my working
portfolio begins
with the files on my hard drive or a Zip disk and
ultimately copied
to a Jaz disk for CD-ROM development. I have divided my
Jaz disk
into two separate partitions, one at 650 MB (the size of a
CD-ROM)
and the other at 350 MB for other working files, such as
the Windows
version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. [When creating a
cross-platform
CD-ROM, I use the Toast software with my CD-ROM recorder,
and the
process of creating a “Hybrid” CD (with both Mac
and ISO
9660 formats) requires that my “shared data”
exist on
a Macintosh-formatted volume, and the files that are only
used in
the ISO 9660 (Windows-accessible format) be on a different
volume
and incorporated when the CD is written.]
On
a regular basis, I select specific files that I want to
include
in my formal portfolio and print them to PDF files. I
regularly
save e-mail messages from students and colleagues as well
as other
documents that I create in a folder on my hard drive
titled “new
items.” I create many Web pages to support my
courses, and
I also save those in PDF format. Once a year, I sit down
with my
working portfolio files, discard items that no longer
represent
my best work, and insert the new items that I’ve
collected
over the last year. My portfolio is organized around the
standards
for teaching, research, and service that have been
established for
my college. I use this opportunity to reflect on my goals
for the
past year, my achievements, my goals for the next year,
and my growth
as an educator. I pull all the new files together into a
new PDF
file, reorganize my portfolio on my Jaz disk, and write a
new cross-platform
CD-ROM portfolio.
I
have also introduced this strategy to students in the MAT
program
at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where they have
included
portfolio artifacts which demonstrate achievement of the
State of
Alaska Teacher Education Standards (4 AAC 04.200). These
artifacts
include lesson plans, QuickTime video clips of classrooms
and student
teaching, student comments, student products, a current
résumé,
and a self-evaluation.
Back
to “Create Your Own Electronic Portfolio”
Back
to the online supplement
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Helen Barrett (afhcb@uaa.alaska.edu) has been involved in educational technology and staff development
in Alaska for the past 17 years. She currently coordinates educational
technology for the School of Education and advises the New Media Center
at the University of Alaska Anchorage. You can contact her at 907.786.4423
or visit the internationally known Electronic Portfolio Web site (http://transition.alaska.edu/www/portfolios.html).
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Copyright © 2000, ISTE (International
Society for Technology in Education).
All rights reserved.
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