Overview

The aim of this project is the development of a new, dynamic, digital appraisal tool for the collection and presentation of portfolio evidence of a educator's competencies, which can be used in the various educational and appraisal systems throughout the European Union. The project intends to address the self-improvement/self-evaluation of educators (such as teachers, educational administrators, inspectors, teacher trainers and trainees) and their objective and transparent evaluation with the help of new technologies.

Digital Portfolio is a Java-based environment for the development and publication of teachers' portfolios in digital format.

Digital Portfolio has been created with the help of a "Digital Portfolio Environment" (DigiPoE)an open software system providing a reference-implementation of basic portfolio functionalities for inserting, updating and annotating digital content, storing it in digital format and publishing it in standalone (CDROM) or networked media (Internet), according to the portfolio standard.

The digital portfolio offers an innovative method of assessment/self-evaluation to educators since it enables them to maintain and provide a much richer presentation of their work. Based on an analysis of requirements, we designed DigiPoE to include nine categories of information that are important to the users of the system. A user/educator can change, add or delete information and artifacts in these nine categories and publish the digital portfolio (in its entirety or parts of it) on various media, such as compact disks, floppy disks or over the Internet. The user has the option to choose parts of the portfolio (if any) that are to remain private, i.e. not published, when the final user portfolio is presented. DigiPoE organizes the content of the digital portfolio as a hierarchical structure of nodes, which is encoded as an XML grammar. This hierarchical structure is essentially an index to the content of the digital portfolio and its collection of artifacts.

| Categories Included in Digital Portfolio of a Teacher|

• Personal: Personal information of educators, such as communication information, personal photo, some comments or thoughts in general.
• Curriculum Vitae: The teacher can complete his/her CV, according to the European format, add reports from inspectors and letters of recommendations and copies of certificates acquired by a teacher from his/her participation to training activities, pre- and in-service.
• Journal: This a professional journal about what the teacher learned from teaching and learning.
• Teaching Philosophy: This category includes a reflective statement by the teacher, describing his/her personal teaching philosophy, strategies, objectives, and methodologies.
• Lessons: Copies of lesson or unit plans, handouts given to students, assignments, worksheets, multimedia material recordings from teaching a typical class.
• Feedback: Feedback and comments by a teaching observer, peer or administrator, recommendations and student evaluations.
• Student work: The teacher can add tests and samples of student work.
• Activities: Information and multimedia material from participation in out-of-school or in school activities.
• School Problems: The teacher can add all the problems she/he encountered during the years of teaching, and how all those problems were solved.

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Publications

• E. Georgiou, A. Stassopoulou and M. Dikaiakos, "DIGIPOE: An Open Standard and Reference Implementation for Digital Portfolios". In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computer-based Learning in Science (CBLIS 2003), pages 15-25, July 2003, Cyprus (available in pdf).
• Eleni Georgiou, "Digital Portfolio for Teachers and Educators", B.Sc. Thesis, June 2003.

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Presentations

• "An open standard and reference implementation for digital portofolios", by Eleni Georgiou, Sixth International Conference on Computer-based Learning in Science, July 2003 (available in ppt).