ePortfolios and Interviews Week 2

So, it seems that interviews are pretty darn important if you want a job.
Who'd have thought it?? Most of it seems to be pretty commonsense; be on time, look professional, be prepared, be direct, be honest, leave on a positive note and be polite.

To be honest, I haven't done that many interviews in my life but it seems only natural to give the best possible first impression you can! It seems like a lot of pressure and fairly nerve-wracking which makes me a bit afraid for applying for jobs when it happens.

Using Microsoft Publisher to create a brochure was great, although it seemed like it may a bit difficult to use as even I struggled! I actually found fiddling around with the layout, colours and pictures to be the most satisfying. I liked trying to make my brochure look great and appealing! I think Publisher may be a little bit difficult for some students to grasp but that may be because I found it difficult due to never having used it before! Being able to select layouts and colour schemes would really appeal to kids, it means they can be creative without

having to be a whiz with formatting.

ePortfolios seem like a great place to show a teaching philosophy, achievements, reflections, resume, classroom set-up, photos of students' school work, community interests. As they are electronic, they are also very easy to update when you need to. Having a portfolio on a computer allows you to make it aesthetically appealing as well which is important when creating the all-mighty first impression with a potential employer.

During research for the assessment ePortfolio for this subject, my attention was brought to an important aspect of digital portfolios raised by Helen Woodward and Phil Nanlohy in 'Digital Portfolios: Fact or Fiction' in which they attempt to ascertain the usefullness of digital portfolios. An interesting point was that with digital portfolios can often become more of a tool for schooling in technology than a learning opportunity to display school work (http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/woo02363.htm). Having seen some digital portfolios created by primary school students, they do seem like great ways to show their work and also to experiment with technology but to maintain the emphasis on either one would require the proper set-up and motivation in the classroom.

I believe that portfolios do offer both at once, a learning opportunity to develop and display work and a means to expand their knowledge of technology. In a classroom that was already heavily ICT based, there would be no such issue as the one described as Woodward and Nanlohy where "learning to use the technology itself could then subsume the learning opportunities of portfolio construction" because students would already be fluent in the language of digital portfolios. Many of my future students will probably know more than me in any ICT lesson but in these cases they can teach me, my role as a teacher then is to maintain focus on developing a portfolio in terms of their learning and school work.