Saturday, September 25, 2004
Folio Live
I am now reviewing the commercial tools, and have just re-created my portfolio in McGraw-Hill's Folio Live, a tool specifically developed for Teacher Education. It took me about three hours to finish all of the entries using this program, because I chose to use the program as it was intended: a collection of artifacts with reflections.
The layout is very plain, with only four templates to select. The lack of flexibility in the layout was frustrating. Still, I can see that this tool would be useful for novices, especially if I used a pre-set template. There was absolutely no need to know HTML (unless you wanted to embed links in the narrative).
I really like the "Manage Artifacts" function, where I can see all of the artifacts that I have uploaded (my archive). I could also record my reflections on each artifact or an optional introduction (a caption), before viewing the artifact. However, there is no built-in way to reflect on a grouping of artifacts (a category). Under a category, there was only a list of links to the artifacts, with no option for meta-reflection, unless I inserted that overall reflection as another artifact.
The one feature that is very useful is Download Portfolio, which is designed to create a Zip file to download the portfolio to my hard drive. However, it did not work with Mozilla on my Mac (the folder was empty) but worked when I downloaded the Zip file with Safari. I had a complete version of my portfolio in HTML format on my hard drive. But on a Saturday afternoon, the program was very slow. I can see why this program is not very popular in Teacher Ed.
The layout is very plain, with only four templates to select. The lack of flexibility in the layout was frustrating. Still, I can see that this tool would be useful for novices, especially if I used a pre-set template. There was absolutely no need to know HTML (unless you wanted to embed links in the narrative).
I really like the "Manage Artifacts" function, where I can see all of the artifacts that I have uploaded (my archive). I could also record my reflections on each artifact or an optional introduction (a caption), before viewing the artifact. However, there is no built-in way to reflect on a grouping of artifacts (a category). Under a category, there was only a list of links to the artifacts, with no option for meta-reflection, unless I inserted that overall reflection as another artifact.
The one feature that is very useful is Download Portfolio, which is designed to create a Zip file to download the portfolio to my hard drive. However, it did not work with Mozilla on my Mac (the folder was empty) but worked when I downloaded the Zip file with Safari. I had a complete version of my portfolio in HTML format on my hard drive. But on a Saturday afternoon, the program was very slow. I can see why this program is not very popular in Teacher Ed.
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