The Best Platform for School Portfolios

Over the last few weeks I've been working with several clients focused on Career and Technical Education. One of the projects involved helping State Directors of CTE craft a vision and a set of principles to guide development of CTE into the future.

The other project focused on helping one state understand and define for themselves what it means to be 'college and career ready' (a new jargon that is getting more and more focus and will possibly be made into policy nationwide.

During these sessions, as has been the case for more than 10 years now, there was considerable conversation about the need for, and value of, digital learning portfolios.

As I listened to these conversations it became clearer and clearer to me that the perfect platform for wide spread adoption of a digital online portfolio for schools and learning already exists and is used by more than 300 million people. It's called Facebook.

It's so obvious to me that every person that has a profile is already used to creating and sharing some part of themselves with other people - mostly friends - but that this platform can easily be morphed into one that will support digital files and media of all types - allowing people of all ages to share and show-off what they have produced in the context of learning.

Facebook was originally conceived as a tool for people involved in a school to stay in touch with other people they knew from that school. As it has morphed into a social media platform for people of all walks of life the concept is very well accepted and well used (people spend more time on Facebook than they do on just about any other web site).

It makes perfect sense to me that every profile can have an option to add a section specifically designed to 'show-off' all forms of self-expression and learning.

If I was an app developer I'd develop that app immediately!