Resources+for+Education+Majors

**What is a professional portfolio?** A professional portfolio is a collection of evidence of one’s professional practice. Read [|more].

**Why should I create a professional portfolio?** A portfolio is one way that an educational professional may demonstrate his competencies, skills, and abilities outside of the classroom environment. It is unrealistic to imagine that one or two observations conducted by administrators throughout a semester or year could represent the professional's true competencies. These observations are merely snapshots of a brief moment. A professional portfolio serves to document one's capabilities in all areas of the professional practice. Read [|more].

**What is included in a quality portfolio?**
A good professional portfolio contains these four elements:
 * 1) Contains [|selected] documentation of your professional practice.
 * 2) Is [|tailored] to the needs of your audience.
 * 3) Is [|organized] around a set of professional standards and is easy to navigate.
 * 4) Contains [|reflective pieces] that explain why an artifact was selected for inclusion.

**What does a professional portfolio look like?** Here are some samples of professional portfolios. I recommend that you keep a consistent design among your pages and keep them simple. The content that you are presenting is the most important feature, not the technology!
 * 1) This [|website] developed by a former graduate student. This website is very well organized, presents rich evidence of her teaching skills, abilities and attitudes, and creates a nice orienting context and reflective pieces to give her audience a clear rationale of why the pieces where included.
 * 2) The [|Gallery] of Teaching and Learning
 * 3) [|TAP] resources
 * 4) Or try using an online search engine to locate others.

**Where can I create a professional portfolio?** With the easy access to Web 2.0 tools, I highly recommend that you consider using a free wiki tool. Go 2 Web 2.0 is a directory of thousands of free web tools. Among them are tools known as wikis. I really like these because you can set the privacy features so that only you, the author, can edit them. There are advanced features for design and security if you pay a fee, however.

If you are familiar with Facebook or MySpace (and who isn't these days?), then using these tools will be a breeze for you. I highly recommend that you do not use your Facebook or MySpace accounts to set up a professional portfolio. There has been some bad press about these sites and using the site may not promote you professionally as you intend. If you haven't used Facebook or MySpace, it's still really easy to use a wiki. The wiki site will provide tutorials, help, and videos to get you started.

You might try visiting Go to [|Web 2.0] and use the Tag Selector to select only wikis to see what are available. New sites are posted very frequently. Two sites that I know have had some longevity and are not likely to go away are [|Wikispaces] (that's what is hosting this site you are looking at right now) and [|PB wiki]. Know that there are many, many more sites.

Please know that you can use [|MS word], [|Powerpoint], Adobe Acrobat, Inspiration, and many more software applications to create a portfolio. The links will take you to templates I've created that you may use if you choose.

Top of Page