My e-portfolio has been an opportunity to consider what examples of my work represent the educator I aspire to be. As I was considering which artifacts to upload at the end of term 1 and beginning of term 2, the questions I asked myself had a lot to do with my values as an educator and what work best represented those values in a skillful and creative way. This in turn allowed me to reflect on what those values are, and I found it helpful to return to my pedagogical philosophy statement when considering this. Taken as a whole, this practice of considering my values, considering my work in response to those values, and returning to previous reflections on my educational philosophies, is at the core of my understanding of what it means to be a reflective practitioner. Put in different words, choosing what work to share allowed me to consider the ways in which my praxis as an educator is aligned (or could be better align) with the theoretical and ethical underpinnings of my beliefs about education.

The articles we were offered to reflect on our e-portfolios for this post offer a lot of options for how an e-portfolio might be used once a teacher has graduated. While some of these ideas (like utilising the e-portfolio for ongoing communication with parents) don’t particularly resonate with me, I do find myself increasingly curious about how I might continue using my e-portfolio. Certainly as I curate it to present my best self as an educator, I see how it could be valuable as an offering in the hiring process. I also think it might be a nice way to maintain and look back on my favourite activities, lesson plans, and strategies over the span of my education and career. One use however that made me really curious, was the idea of using my own e-portfolio as an exemplar for students, who might create an e-portfolio as a form of assessment for a course or several courses. I see the potential for students to not only create work for the e-portfolio but also reflect on and choose the work that best represents who they are as a learner and as a person. I particularly enjoy teaching late elementary and early middle school grades, so this feels like a fantastic opportunity as students do start to really build and strengthen their self-identity in those years. 

I find myself still slowly navigating and investigating my curiosities around the e-portfolio. In many ways, it has felt like putting together a blog or myspace page felt in the early years of social media – a chance to create an aspirational version of the self. So I am hopeful that as I build that best educator in e-portfolio form, I am able to use that as a guidepost for my honest, everyday, in the classroom approach. And I hope that I continue to do so after graduation, and potentially find ways to offer e-portfolio to students as a means of creating aspirational and value driven identity in their own learning journeys.