Mahara Eportfolios/EssentialSkills

Developing essential skills
Students will develop their ‘Essential Skills’ through learning activities which ask them to plan, communicate, problem-solve, work with others and use initiative. When these goals are made explicit for students (e.g. through Employability Skills summaries, or Rubrics made available through a Class View), students can upload Artefacts to the eportfolio as evidence of their essential skills, and use the Blog to reflect on their skill development – at the same time, enhancing their technology skills.

It is important that students do this with a sense of purpose. When you discuss essential skills with students, there is an opportunity to reinforce their value to employers, to emphasise the notion of transferability, and to underline ways in which they can use Mahara to craft different Views of their evidence for different audiences.

You will probably refer to the following topics in the Mahara User Guide:

Artefacts: My Files, Upload a file, Tags, Create a Folder

Blogs: My Blogs, Create a Blog, Add a Blog Post, Add a file from My Files, Upload a file to a Blog, Embed an image to a Blog post, View Blog, Blog comments

Views: My Views, Create a view, Step One – Details, Step Two – Layout block, Step Three – Configure block settings, Step Four – Assign Access to View, Providing a Link to a View.