Uploading materials to the University of Minnesota’s open source ePortfolio is a great way to save work securely and to prepare portfolios for a variety of purposes.  Students, faculty, staff and alumni can securely store up to 5 gigabytes of material for a variety of types of portfolios – including job hunting portfolios that can be shared with prospective employers.  It’s a great way for pre-service teachers to save and display their teaching examples, lesson plans, and evidence of accreditation milestones.

Of course, the big challenge is to maintain that collection, starting with frequently saving/uploading of potentially useful material.  I strongly recommend that you stop at the end of each and every semester to upload your best work for that term – papers, photographs of artifacts you created (such as posters or hand puppets or whatever tangible things you made), lesson plans, and digital videos of student teaching reviews.

Uploading materials is actually fairly easy:

  1. Log in to https://portfolio.umn.edu/
  2. Click the “Enter” button
  3. Click on “Manage your collection”
  4. Click the button “Upload a new file”
  5. Click the button “Choose File” and browse your computer for the file you want to upload – when you find it, click “Open”
  6. Once the file is chosen, you can click the “Upload” button
  7. You can edit the description of the file by clicking the “Edit” button after the file upload confirmation
This process simply puts a digital copy in the collection.  To organize it for viewing and to share it, click the “Share” button and create a new portfolio by picking the elements you want to include.  You have limited options for organizing how the portfolio appears, which is why I have given students other options for creating personal portfolios.
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