E-Portfolios

The most meaningful aspect to portfolios is the reflection piece. Because of portfolios, students are not just submitting a project to meet a deadline (as I certainly did in my high school years) but taking the time to examine the purpose. The most learning that I've experience occured when I took the time to reflect on my teaching and graduate work projects. For teachers of the higher grades, students are able to manage their portfolio independently while the teacher can comment electronically. But I am wondering how to manage an electronic portfolio in first grade. Currently, I select student work. I have in the past had students keep a writing portfolio. It is extremely time consuming and I found it hard to manage student-teacher conferences with all to the teaching content I had to get through. Rubrics work well though. Any suggestions? But from our readings, what I found to be most useful to me were the templates to produce web-publishable mulitmedia projects. I can create alphabet books and various slide shows. From experience, some the best learning that took place in my classroom were collaborative internet research projects. After such work, the students could create a slide show as a culminating project! Wow! The resources are endless. After the completion of such a project, individual students can reflect through conversation or written work as to what they learned, why the choose the topic covered and question what else they may want to know about the topic. Anyway, I am curious to hear how other teachers manage and use portfolios with their students.