Kathy Schrock's Tech Quest Kathy Schrock's Tech Quest What are electronic portfolios and how can I store them? by Kathy Schrock As more and more technology appears in the classroom, teachers are finding new and exciting ways to use it to support teaching and learning. Many teachers, for example, are getting students involved in supplementing traditional portfolios (examples of student work from throughout the year) with electronic versions. Electronic portfolios can contain text, digital and scanned images, video clips, sound clips, and more. This data, however, takes up a lot of space on a computer's hard drive. To learn tips for temporarily and, in some cases, permanently saving information in students' electronic portfolios, let's go on a Tech Quest. A Tech Quest is a model of professional development in which each letter in "quest" stands for a step we'll explore. Each quest is aligned with one of the standards from the International Society for Technology in Education's "National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers" (http://www.iste.org/). Kathy Schrock, a technology coordinator in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, created Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators on the Discovery Channel school site: http://discoveryschool.com/schrockguide/ The Quest: Storing Electronic Portfolios Q Questioner: Who is going on the quest? It may be a classroom teacher, a computer teacher, or a technology specialist in your school. U Understanding: What is the purpose of the quest? What is an electronic portfolio? What are some options for storing electronic portfolios? E Explanation: Exploring options for finding an in-depth answer With the recent addition of computers, digital cameras, and scanners to the classroom, there has been considerable growth in the creation of electronic portfolios. These electronic portfolios usually contain the results of a performance-based assessment, such as a videotaped clip of a presentation or speech, or a multimedia project. They may include pictures, sounds, recorded voices, movie clips, links to the Internet, and scanned artwork and papers. The template many teachers use to create these electronic portfolios includes a table of contents, a student-written description of the portfolio-making project, a student-written evaluation of the process and the product, and the showcased product itself. Storing electronic portfolio data takes up a lot of space on the computer hard drive. One photograph, for example, can take up more than one megabyte of hard-drive space, and one second of digital video takes eight megabytes of hard-drive space. That means that a one-minute video would take up almost 500 megabytes! Few classroom computers are able to provide this type of storage space for individual students. But there are several ways to expand your storage capacity.
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