Portfolios collect a variety of documents and artifacts to communicate accomplishments, works in progress, or academic histories. With the Internet, both students and teachers can offer portfolios electronically, sharing work with peers, colleagues, parents, potential employers—anyone in the world—easily and quickly.

Such e-portfolios can typically serve one or more of these purposes:
• Class project portfolios: Present a gallery of student work on a particular assignment or collect materials gathered by students over a longer period of time for a large project. Allow students to collaborate and assemble their collective output.
• Student portfolios: Gather student product and responses to make assessment easier—the teacher uses Acrobat reviewing and commenting tools to provided feedback to students on their work. Serve as a digital resume to aid students in acquiring employment or entrance into institutions of higher education and to provide students opportunity to reflect on their work as a whole.
• Curriculum portfolios: Collect a package of materials for students where no textbook exists or as a way to augment or update an existing textbook.
• Teaching portfolios: Offer evidence of teaching performance to streamline a professional certification process or perhaps to show implementation of teaching methodologies. Include examples of lesson plans, unit study plans, an assertion of a particular teaching philosophy, images of students at work, or perhaps a video of the teacher teaching a class.

E-portfolios are rich. A PDF portfolio created in Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Pro is a container for any sort of electronic media. It can store not only text but images, movies, audio, video—you can include almost any type of digital object in a PDF portfolio.

E-portfolios are scalable and expandable. An e-portfolio can contain any number of pages. You might have dozens or even hundreds of pages to keep track of. Storing them in an easily organized e-portfolio makes them readily accessible and easily searchable. In electronic form, a portfolio is much easier to update and augment than a paper based portfolio.

E-portfolios provide autonomy in publishing. Instead of waiting for someone else to write just the right textbook with exactly the right materials, you can package your own best anthology of lessons, readings, assignments, and practicum guidance. The ease of PDF distribution allows anyone to assemble and distribute materials widely, without specialized technical knowledge.

E-portfolios are narrative. Highlight exceptional work, show a progression of expertise, or document a particular project. Your students get to tell their own stories.

E-portfolios are universally accessible. Viewing a multimedia document or presentation on a machine other than the one that created it can lead to unexpected results. When rich media and other specialized electronic assets are assembled by traditional methods, viewers may need three or four applications to interact with a portfolio. But using Acrobat to wrap your material into PDF format allows everyone to view and interact with your materials.

The files in an e-portfolio can be in different formats, created in different applications. An e-portfolio can combine all the documents for a specific project: text documents, images, videos, Flash movies, illustrations, PowerPoint presentations. The original files retain their individual identities but are part of the one PDF portfolio file. Each component file can be opened, read, edited, and formatted independent of the other component files in the e-portfolio.

An e-portfolio built with Acrobat and viewed with Adobe Reader® is a robust mechanism to deliver the right experience for a given audience. You can present any number of files in one reliable, secure, and accessible Acrobat PDF. You can control the presentation of those files with sophisticated navigational structures that require minimal effort to implement.

At the same time, e-portfolios allow both teachers and students to demonstrate competency in technology integration and effective communication by illustrating the ability to create a customized experience for readers, crafting just the right portfolio for the designated purpose.

Download the PDF to learn:
• How to plan an e-portfolio
• How to introduce students to the Acrobat interface and workspace
• How to prepare files for inclusion in an e-portfolio
• How to create and add content to an e-portfolio
• How to personalize an e-portfolio
• How to publish an e-portfolio

Published with permission from Adobe.