Portfolios: Not just a big leather satchel anymore

I remember back during my post bac days I created an efolio, which served as a resume and teaching portfolio. I included lots of links, documents, web pages, and the like, all highlighting my teacher preparation. At the time, efolio was about the only thing that was out there for this purpose, but since then blogs, wikis, and nings have come onto the scene...

I'm thinking that I will eventually take my own efolio material and convert it into a wiki. I'm planning on doing something similar with my students as the year progresses.

At the moment, we're working on a unit wiki around the novel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry". This is going to be a bit of a warm up for the "big show". Right now, we're adding chapter summaries, comic life adaptations of key points in the story, and down the line we'll add some voice thread and imovie files that they will work on, all based on their own narrative writing.

The "big show" I reference will be individual (hopefully) wikis that include each of their large writing assignments, transcripts of their online feedback and critiquing, and some of their online collaboration work that they will be doing over the next few months. I'm hoping that this will serve as a map of where they've been that can be useful to both my students as a reflection piece to help them decide on where they want to go, and myself as an instructor so I can have an easily accessible record of assessments and instructional pieces for my future planning. I've always had access to all kinds of numbers based on state assessments, but to have constant access to a year's worth of tangible performance assessments will be so much more useful to me. It's one thing to see mathematical representations of a student's ability, but another to actually see the influence of the instructional process. Of course, it's possible that the push to meet standards will eat up more of my time than I can spare, thus making my utopic vision impossible. I'll try anyway.