My School is planning for the next course to perform an experiment based on the use of ePortfolios. In the Spanish Educational System exists in grade 7th a subject called ‘Proyecto interdisciplinar‘ literally translated into English as ‘Interdisciplinary Project’ and commonly known as PI. The School plan for this one-hour-a-week subject is to introduce students in the habit of reflecting about the skills, knowledge and experiences acquired through all subjects in grade 7th and following at the same time a PBL based methodology.

Only a few and short guidelines are given to teachers about how to teach this PI subject. It means that it’s up to them presenting a syllabus and a project to be carried out along the course. Students at grade 7th start the Secondary School and they will have to cope with much more subjects, more teachers, more exams and a stressing timetable. Moving up from the ‘sweet’ Primary to Secondary is not easy at all for them.

Normally, the staff which usually work with grade 7th are aware of the difficulties they will have to overcome, so it’s commonly accepted that PI shouldn’t be a hard (difficult) subject for grade 7th students. On the other hand, with just one hour a week is not enough to develop an extensive program. At the same time, there is another subject, mandatory for all the students in Secondary, called ‘Tutorías’, freely translated as ‘Counselling’, where a teacher (called Tutor) takes care about a group (usually 25) of students to help them to face the daily issues that usually appear in a Secondary School. Tutors (Counselors) are, as in many other countries, in charge of talking with Students and their Parents about anything related to students’s life. To perform counselling activities, tutors (counselors) have an hour a week scheduled, with the whole group in a classroom and another extra hour a week (also scheduled) to keep personal interviews with students.

Coming back to the goal of my post, I must say that the experiment (or experience) that my school is going to carry out next course consists on joining both subjects: Counselling and PI. The same teacher will be responsible for both subjects in each group (we have 4 groups of 25 students in grade 7th). The PI project will be to teach our students to create personal ePortfolios to register evidences of their improvements and achievements. The School also expects some side benefits as a consequence of the deployment of this plan: beyond the main goal which is the reflection on learnings and achievements of our students, we also expect in our grade 7th students a significant improvement in their IT and Writing competences.

Our background with ePortfolios started some years ago. A couple of teachers, me included, started to speak about how important is to collect evidences of our learning, achievements and progresses along the School life. We outlined some activities to initiate our students on the routine of collecting evidences from our subjects, creating digital artifacts and storing them in a digital ePortfolio. The selected ePortfolio for supporting this pioneer adventure was Mahara due to three main reasons:

1. Mahara was/is an open-source application as it is Moodle, our School VLE.
2. Mahara could/can be easily linked to our Moodle VLE so that students can take advantage of a feature called SSO (Single Signed-On) existent on both applications to log in once (we use Moodle as SSO provider) and move from one to another without having to log in again.
3. Mahara and Elgg were at that moment the leaders in open-source ePortfolio platforms. Actually, it was a random choice choosing Mahara over Elgg.

Along the last three years we tested Mahara features, since version 1.3.x to the current one 1.7.2. We were able to see both its strengths and weaknesses along with the progresses made by its developers in each new releases.

With this landscape behind me, I’m facing a responsability in selecting the best application to build the ePortfolio system for our School. We’d like to have a robust, flexible and scalable application.  We even wondered if it was really necessary to have a common ePortfolio for the whole School or, going on as we did so far an allowing teachers and students to use whatever solution they liked. After an strong and honest debate to assess pros and cons of common and free-chosen platforms we decided to implant a common platform for the whole School. The replicable model would be something similar to our beloved and successful Moodle-VLE but, can Mahara meet the requeriments to become our trusted School ePortflolio?

Since the end  of the course in June, this question is flying around my head: What’s the best choice for a School ePortfolio?

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