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i-Folio

Documenting Excellence

The i-Folio system is a product of the eEducation group in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University and is a tool that is used by the teacher preparation program in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture. The i-Folio system is an interactive portfolio documentation tool that allows pre-service teachers to display work and experiences from their academic career and correlate that work to state and national standards. The i-Folio interface promotes efficient verification of student work by College of Education and Human Development faculty to ensure that standards are being met.

The i-Folio system consists of two main components: (1) web-based portfolios (i-Folios) created and developed by pre-service teachers during their academic career, and (2) an interactive database that allows instructors to verify the contents of a student’s i-Folio. A typical i-Folio will contain authentic learnerspecific artifacts that demonstrate growth over time and the development of effective teaching skills. These artifacts include class assignments, examples of student work, professional evaluations, and brief sample teaching video clips.

The i-Folio system was developed to address the need to document the technology skills that pre-service teachers were acquiring through participation in a grant-based program entitled Technology Mentor Fellowship Program. In spring 2002, pilot testing consisted of approximately 200 pre-service teachers successfully creating i-Folios. Today, approximately 4,400 student i-Folio accounts have been established.

According to Ben Smith, director of the i-Folio system, “The current i-Folios that are being produced are technically much better than the ‘pilot test’ system, because our training materials have improved and because the students have a much longer time frame to develop their i-Folio.” Melissa Knetsar ’02 was a part of the “pilot test” group, and continues to update her i-Folio and use it regularly in her professional career: “The principals I interviewed with were very impressed with my portfolio…having a teaching episode on my site allowed the principals and teachers to get a feel for who I was before the interview. It was wonderful!”

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