Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of the Portfolio

Across the U.S., a growing number of schools are turning to ePortfolio assessment technologies to help them monitor and evaluate student progress in a variety of disciplines--and to help them and their students do even more. Across the board, educators report that their ePortfolio efforts have revolutionized the learning process, and the technologies they utilize seem to improve every day, further enabling and enhancing the efforts. Moreover, given the bells and whistles (and price tags) of all sorts of recent technology releases, those tools commonly utilized in the ePortfolio paradigm are relatively inexpensive, easy to use, and scalable to an expanding user environment. Perhaps most importantly, students--the ones who use electronic portfolios every day--like them. This article discusses the challenges and benefits of adopting ePortfolio, as well as ways of exploiting the power of this technology.