Assesment Potential

The digital age has tremendously assisted the education profession which was bound by laborious and tedious paper-based documents. Writing reports and gathering information about the education process, both from the end user (student) and the initiator (teacher) was often put off, ignored, and not valued, due in large part for the burden it placed on the process. It just took too much time and had little in the way of variety.

Traditionally, the use of a portfolio in teacher education has taken the form of a notebook filled with documents denoting a teacher candidate's demonstration of progress throughout their educational career. Using a hard copy or paper design for portfolio creation is problematic due to issues of storage space, expense, environmental conservation, potential for damage or loss, and establishing difficult assessment procedures (Thomas, Lameson, & King, 2001). (Shannon Owen Trimble A Case Study of the Teacher Education Faculty's Perception of the eFolio Program at a Private Central Texas University

With E-portfolios, or E-Folios, or what some schools of education call Web Folios, the process of teaching-learning, on all levels, can be enhanced for now we have an environment that truly can become evidentiary and not just hit-and-miss perceptions done by supervisor observations or a casual random check of student progress from grades or selected artifacts like projects or term papers.

Initiating portfolios is not new. It has been around for a long time. Gathering evidence of performance (both teacher and pupil) has been seen as a marked improvement in the assessment process, a much needed vehicle of tracking the efficacy of new programs or innovative interventions. Our action research methodology is enhanced by this kind of digital assessment in that we, as scholar-practitioners, can modify our approaches by a click of the mouse, for we can see, from the evidence placed in our files, what is working and what is not, and what outside environmental issues are affecting our objectives.

There are three general purposes of E-folios: those for developmental purposes, those for presentation purposes, and those for assessment purposes. It is my belief that assessment is the most important of these purposes for assessment is an evaluative process often linked to financial support. Both the public education system and the private depend upon funding, and how we spend money and for what, has been a long, contentious debate among policy makers and stake holders. With E-folios, accessible to everyone (protecting privacy rights when appropriate) decision makers can determine what is yielding more achievement for the money in terms of programs, instructional approaches, and organization of curriculum.