ePortfolio Overview for LaGuardia Faculty

LaGuardia’s ePortfolio project helps students examine and reflect on their learning and career goals, smoothing the transition from LaGuardia Community College to the worlds of work and further education. The ePortfolio encourages students to think about their learning in a broad context of family, career, culture and experience. It provides a record of where a student has been, where a student is, and where a student would like to go.

Most students are very excited by the prospect of creating an ePortfolio. They immediately recognize the value of having an electronic tool they can use to showcase their work to prospective employers or to four-year colleges. Faculty realize that one of the ePortfolio’s most valuable assets is the opportunity it presents for students to reflect on their life experiences over the course of their time at LaGuardia, and to help them make important connections among aspects of their life as students, community members, and as professionals. Helping students to engage in this process, summed up by the phrase “collect, select, reflect, connect,” is where faculty play a key role.

LaGuardia faculty are helping students use ePortfolio in a spectrum of ways that vary greatly, some much more involved than others. Here are some suggestions and resources for how to:

1. introduce LaGuardia’s ePortfolio project to your students, and
2. provide students with the opportunity to deposit a piece of work into their collection (which can later be used in their ePortfolio.)
   

How do I prepare to introduce ePortfolio in my classes?

Here are some suggestions to help you prepare for introducing ePortfolio:

  Familiarize yourself with LaGuardia’s ePortfolio project by looking at the materials available on the Technology Tools page for Faculty. You may choose to use one of the multimedia presentations or some of the handouts you’ll find there when you introduce ePortfolio to your students.

  Check in with your students to see if any of them already have ePortfolios. If so, you might want to ask them to help you convey the concept and their experience to your other students.

  Think about when you’ll introduce ePortfolio to students. Have a plan about when and how you will stage ePortfolio during your semester. We’ve found that it helps when faculty introduce the concept early on in the semester, and then structure time in to have students deposit one or more assignments later on.

  Determine which assignment(s) from your course(s) you would like students to deposit. If you prefer, you can use ePortfolio to help students demonstrate progress, e.g. deposit a first draft of a paper and then its revision.

  Ask students to include the assignment along with the work they deposit.

  Consider designing a reflective assignment that allows students to think about their assignments and their progress in more depth.

  Use the ePortfolio Faculty Checklist to help you prepare to implement ePortfolio into your classroom.

Be in touch with the ePortfolio staff and the ePortfolio faculty leaders for any support you need in introducing and implementing ePortfolio.

Do I need to use Blackboard to do ePortfolio?

The LaGuardia ePortfolio system is set up through the Blackboard interface. To utilize ePortfolio with your students you will need to request a Blackboard site for your course first, either by:

emailing BlackboardSupport@lagcc.cuny.edu or

filling out the online request form at https://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/blackboard/services/

Although you must log into Blackboard to enter the ePortfolio system, you are not required to use Blackboard with your students. Basically, Blackboard can be used simply as a way to sign in to ePortfolio.