Student Portfolios for the 21st Century
Creating student portfolios is not a new idea in education. Portfolios provide meaningful documentation of a student's abilities and achievements, that can then be shared with their parents, teachers, college administers, potential employers, and other students. What has changed is the move from the traditional paper portfolio to the more powerful digital portfolio.
This transition to digital portfolios, over their paper counterpart, offers a number of advantages including the ability to incorporate all of a student's work regardless of medium. Today, students use a variety of tools in the classroom including computers, the Internet, digital cameras, and content CD-ROMs. The use of these tools in lessons creates projects that produce text documents, digital pictures, videos, sounds, and animation. eZedia's easy-to-use software allows students to simply drag-and-drop many of these major file formats onto their eZedia project - without worrying about compatibility issues.
eZedia software takes student learning and portfolio creation to the next level. Students develop cross-curricular thinking by linking work from one subject area to another. For example, students can link a social studies lesson on urban development, to a science chart on increased carbon monoxide emissions caused by traffic and population growth. This approach helps students use the knowledge and content from one subject area, to support and build on what they are learning in other subjects.
eZedia offers a number of FREE Digital Portfolio Resources to help get you started. Whether you need a little inspiration or could benefit from the eZedia Digital Portfolio Lesson Plan be sure to check these links out.
 Download the eZedia Digital Portfolio Lesson Plan and get your classroom creating a portfolio of their work today.
How to Get your Digital Portfolio online or on CD
Once you've created your digital portfolio, you'll need to get it into other hands. You can do this by writing it to a CD, or uploading it to the web.
Creating a Portfolio CD-ROM
Whether you've used eZediaMX or eZediaQTI to assemble your portfolio, you can create a CD-ROM. If you are using eZediaQTI, all you need to include on your CD is the QuickTime installers for both Mac and Windows.
When creating a CD-ROM for your eZediaMX project, you also need to include copies of eZediaPlayer for Mac and Windows. For full instructions on creating a cross-platform interactive CD-ROM with your eZediaMX project, download the tutorial, or watch the training video to get started.
Uploading your Portfolio to the Web
If you've created your digital portfolio in eZediaQTI, you have the option of uploading the entire project to the web. Online, the project can be viewed in any web browser with the QuickTime plug-in. This is a great way to make your portfolio easily accessible. It also makes the process of updating your portfolio much easier, removing the need to burn new CD's.
For more details on how to upload your eZediaQTI project to your web site, view our training video.
Ask Mike
Adding Objects to the Background
The "Add to Background" feature is an often overlooked trick for reducing the file size of your project. Particularly with large graphic objects, such as photos from digital cameras, it is important to add them to the background to save on file size.
Keep in mind that any graphic that has any Links attached or any Effects applied to it should not be added to the background. The interactivity and effects will be lost if it is added to the background.
To add a graphic to the background, select the object and choose "Objects > Add to Background". This reduces the amount of memory it takes to load the project into eZediaMX and eZediaPlayer, increasing performance. When you are finished your project, it's best to give it a once-over to see if there are any graphics that can be added to the background.
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