Provocation — What role do e‑portfolios play in the process of being a reflective practitioner, and how do you expect to use an e‑portfolio once you graduate from your pre-service program?

　　　At first when I was cre­at­ing my e‑portfolio, I felt its pri­ma­ry pur­pose was to share my edu­ca­tion­al phi­los­o­phy and explore the var­i­ous ped­a­go­gies that I sub­scribe to. This would not only help my UNBC pro­fes­sors do for­ma­tive assess­ments to see how my learn­ing is pro­gress­ing, but also con­vey to prospec­tive future employ­ers what kind of teacher I am. How­ev­er, deter­min­ing what arti­facts to post, know­ing that they will be shared pub­licly for the world to see, forced me to reflect on what learn­ing expe­ri­ences res­onat­ed with me the most. For me it was the explo­ration of my phi­los­o­phy and the practicum expe­ri­ences that observed.

　　　The arti­facts I choose to include in my e‑portfolio reflect what edu­ca­tion means to me. They rep­re­sent what I val­ue as a teacher, how to teach­ing holis­ti­cal­ly, effec­tive­ly and equi­tably. Until I took this UNBC pro­gram, I had nev­er con­sid­ered incor­po­rat­ing the FPPL or the nine R’s into my class­es, nor did I ful­ly under­stand the impor­tance of he BCTC’s Teacher Stan­dards. This is an ongo­ing learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me as I try to become a bet­ter edu­ca­tor. It will be inter­est­ing to see how I grow over the 18-month pro­gram, and I won­der what aspects of teach­ing will become para­mount to my edu­ca­tion­al phi­los­o­phy?

　　　Once I grad­u­ate from this pro­gram, rather than act­ing as for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence that can track and assess my learn­ing expe­ri­ence, I want my e‑portfolio to become a place where I can explore dif­fer­ent aspects of the edu­ca­tion­al field that I wish to learn about, and to share my own teach­ing expe­ri­ences to sup­port oth­er teach­ers. I like the idea that it can become my own per­son­al learn­ing net­work (PLN) (Simon, 2014). I will use it as pro­fes­sion­al blog, to share resources, les­son plans, and my thoughts on the teach­ing pro­fes­sion in hopes that it upholds the eighth stan­dard: Edu­ca­tors con­tribute to the pro­fes­sion. One addi­tion­al thought on build­ing per­son­al learn­ing net­works is from Tom Whit­by emphat­i­cal­ly sug­gests that “PLNs Are Col­lab­o­ra­tion” (2013) and that such col­lab­o­ra­tion is eas­i­er now as “[t]echnology has fun­da­men­tal­ly changed col­lab­o­ra­tion by remov­ing bar­ri­ers of time and space” (2013). Based on Whitby’s advice, in addi­tion to using my future e‑portfolio blog as a PSN, I will also use Dis­cord or Face­book to col­lab­o­rate with oth­er edu­ca­tors in real-time.

Ref­er­ences
Simon, E. (2014). Do I need a dig­i­tal teach­ing port­fo­lio? Edu­topia.
　　　https://www.edutopia.org/blog/digital-teaching-portfolio-edwige-simon

Whit­by, T. (2013) How do I get a PLN? Edu­topia.
　　　https://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-do-i-get-a-pln-tom-whitby