A Guide to Uspace/Section 1 Portfolios

The Portfolio section is a place where you can store your work throughout your time at school. Why don't you just save in folders in My Documents computer, you ask? Well, you can, but how often have you created and saved work at school, then forgot to send it home or save it to a flash drive so that you can access it at home, or in reverse you create and save onto your home computer and then can't get to it in school. Saving it into your portfolio means you can access it at home or at school. Many schools also delete profiles at the end of each academic year so you may well lose work. Using the portfolio means that you can access work from a previous year if you need to. Exam boards are increasingly going down the route of asking for evidence in the form of drafts, redrafts and proof that students have progressed; this sort of evidence can be easily stored in your portfolio. However, some preparatory work needs to be done. It is important that some thought is given to the structure of the work in the portfolio so that documents can be easily found. This is what we will look at first.
 * ePortfolio

When you open up the Portfolio section it will be completely blank so you have to build your structure. The Portfolio has Sections, Chapters and Pages. Creating a new Section for each academic year seems to make sense, and then a Chapter for each curriculum area, followed by Pages for each topic. Here is an example;



You can see that I have three Sections - IT, Dio 2009, and Dio 2010, and then within each Section there are Chapters - Dionet, French, and again French, and then within each Chapter there are Pages. So how do you build them? It is relatively straight forward but you do need to think carefully and concentrate!

The little edit icon at the top right hand corner of the page is where you start. If you click on it there is a drop down menu that will ask you to create a Section, a Chapter or a Page. Start off by creating a Section - a box will pop up and ask you to type in a name and then ask you to Create this Section. Now you have created a Section you can add a Chapter to it in just the same way - click on the edit icon, choose Create Chapter, type the title in the box and then Create this Chapter. You add Pages in exactly the same way as you added the Sections and Chapters and now you can add content to the Pages.



The pages are where you can give detail about the topic, you can add images, videos, links to websites, links to documents, reminders to yourself about things you need to do. You can choose to make the pages visible to everybody or just your parents and teachers. So if you are working on a project with a friend you can share it with them and they can comment on what you have done.