College of Education, Department of Teaching and Learning
21st Century ePortfolio Project Site
An ePortfolio for Professional Practice
Welcome to the ePortfolio project for the elementary and secondary teacher education programs.
Becoming a teacher is more than a sequence of college courses and more than time spent in classrooms. Becoming a teacher is a journey of transformation from tacit knowledge learned from books and lectures to practical knowledge gained in classrooms. It is a journey through measurable stages filled with novel experiences in familiar and well established circumstances. Becoming a teacher involves meeting benchmarks, achieving standards, and reflecting on past performance in order to improve future performance. While accumulating and recording artifacts during courses and field work, you will also be establishing a record of your learning and providing evidence that you have fulfilled the objectives outlined for the ePortfolio.
This ePortfolio project is designed to serve as documentation of your performance in course assignments, in field experiences and through the reflections you are required to complete during Practicum 1, Practicum 2, and Student Teaching/Internship in the teacher education program. Your e-portfolio is primarily a tool for your own learning and reflection as you complete your program at UNLV. Putting it together will help you to review all the good work you have done in your teacher education program and to appreciate how much you have learned and grown.
You will be introduced to the e-portfolio project when you enter the teacher education program. Your progress will be checked along the way by site facilitators. At the end of your Student Teaching/Internship, you will present parts of your portfolio to your peers, your mentor teacher, site facilitator, and UNLV faculty. Your portfolio will be evaluated by a rubric and receive a satisfactory or unsatisfactory grade.
You will begin collecting digital artifacts for your ePortfolio during your first semester of professional field work. The accumulation of artifacts will continue until you have finished the program. You are encouraged to save artifacts that you believe illustrate your achievements and the special “aha” moments you experience working with students. This body of work will serve as the master file from which you will select specific artifacts to complete your ePortfolio. There are some required artifacts but you are encouraged to add additional items that you believe are especially reflective of your professional growth.
The e-portfolio is designed to help you demonstrate how well you meet the Interstate Teacher and Assessment Support Consortium Standards (INTASC) Model Core Teaching Standards. Your e-portfolio will also help faculty show accrediting agencies what our students know and can do.
At some point, you may find that this e-portfolio proves helpful for employment purposes. You may, for example, add your resume or a video of your classroom or other artifacts that might be of interest to a potential employer. You also might choose to remove materials that you might not wish to share. At the very least, creating this eportfolio now should help you to address a critical step in your search for a teaching position--taking stock of your professional growth, beliefs, and goals.
Confidentiality Statement:
Selected information from your ePortfolio may be used in confidence by faculty for improving the COE ePortfolio Project, for future ePortfolio submissions, for teacher education program improvement, for research and dissemination of research in presentations at regional, national and international education forums as well as in publications. Candidates who choose not to share their ePortfolios beyond the evaluation period (completion of the program), will in no way be penalized or receive a lower assessment for their ePortfolio Project.