Students

In the project, all participating students were asked to create and work on their own ePortfolio. They were free to choose the platform they prefered. Further they could create either individual or dialogic ePortfolios. Although we started with the idea that each student creates his/her own individual ePortfolio, many students fed back that they prefer working on an ePortfolio in a team or group.

With the ePortfolios we intended to ensure that the students engage in self-reflection by constantly referring to the project activities (e.g. developed research questions, the aims of forming this portfolio, the individual experiences during the study abroad week, their intents, contents and judgements). For us, it was crucial that the prospective teachers would recognise the flexibility and openness of this instrument. It served different purposes throughout the study programme and could be used as an instrument to reflect and document one’s life long learning process and academic career.

Below, you will find some ePortfolios that have been set up by international students who took part in one of the proPIC course at one of the partner institutions. In this project, we were guided by the definition of Shulman (1998) who describes a portfolio as...

"a structured documentary history of a set of coached or mentored accomplishments, substantiated by samples of students' work, and fully realised only through reflective writing, deliberation and serious conversation"

Electronic portfolios - or ePortfolios, in contrast to their paper-based counterparts, contain multimedia, hypermedia and can offer certainf communication capabilities (Lamount 2007). They provide a space for reflection that can include texts, images, audio and video. Further, it can easily be edited and updated. The great potential of an ePortfolio lies in its multimodality and hypertextuality, as well as in the chance of initiating communication and interaction with other users.

The ePortfolios of Cohort I