As you kick off the new calendar year, it’s a great time to take a step back and consider your goals for 2024. I started the first week of the new year working with a district in Missouri. We talked about lots of topics related to EdTech, including how to engage students in meaningful learning experiences. If you want to make sure everyone is engaged in their learning this year, your students need portfolios.
Today on the blog, we’ll look at the benefits of giving students a flexible place to share and celebrate their learning. I’ll also share Wakelet Portfolios, which lets you take your student portfolios to the next level.
Let’s dive into the reasons why I think your students need portfolios this school year!
Student Portfolios in Action
What is a student portfolio? A student portfolio is a curated collection of a student’s work that showcases their accomplishments over a period of time. If you’re familiar with my book EdTech Essentials, I talk about the essentials of curate, create, and share.
Portfolios give students a chance to reflect on their work over the course of the school year. They can curate artifacts they want to share. A digital portfolio lets students share a wide variety of their creations . This could include a link to a Google Doc, a podcast episode they’ve recorded, and so much more. Portfolios are the perfect way for students to share their work with an audience, too.
In K-12 settings, portfolios allow educators and students to document learning experiences, assess growth, and celebrate accomplishments. There are lots of reasons why you might feel like your students need portfolios as you kick off 2024!
Why Students Need Portfolios in 2024
Portfolios are a dynamic way to capture and showcase student learning. Here are three benefits of portfolios to consider this year.
Personalize Learning Experiences
The flexibility of a student portfolio lets you personalize learning experiences. If you are working in an environment where students create different artifacts of learning from their peers, it gives everyone a common place to share their unique creations. For example, if a few of your students create a slide-based presentation, and a few students create a movie to capture their learning, everyone can share their work in their personal portfolio.
College and Career Readiness
As students prepare for college and careers, they will find there are many ways to demonstrate growth and mastery of content. A student portfolio can showcase a student’s learning journey – not simply their final project. This emphasis on process is one of the benefits of introducing portfolios to students. It can mirror the experiences they will have in college and their careers.
Reflect and Celebrate
One reason you might agree that students need portfolios in 2024 is how they provide opportunities for both reflection and celebration. More than just an end-of-unit celebration to mark the completion of a project, a student portfolio can capture student learning throughout the school year. Students can reflect on their progress and celebrate at the same time. With digital portfolios, students can also share their work with a link – making it easy to extend the celebration to family and friends and even share with a global audience if that feels like the best fit for your group.
Wakelet Portfolios
In the video above, you can get a picture of what’s possible with Wakelet Portfolios. If you’ve attended a workshop or webinar with me over the past few years, you’ve probably heard me talk about Wakelet. It’s one of my favorite ways for educators to share resources with colleagues – and it’s a powerful tool for students, too!
With Wakelet Portfolios, your students can organize their work and track their progress over the course of the school year. Students can create sections for different classes, interests, and projects within this super flexible platform. Wakelet is the perfect tool for students to showcase work from different parts of their day, too.
Students can add a video they created for a social studies project, a link to a collaborative document that shows their process for planning a science experiment, a podcast episode where they chat with a classmate about a problem-solving strategy from their math class – you name it, the possibilities are endless!
Do you think your students need portfolios this year? If you’d like to see the power of Wakelet Portfolios, head to this page and schedule a demo with the Wakelet Team. I think you’ll be super impressed with what is possible!
