In Finland, Norway, Italy and Catalonia, there is a strong policy drive to integrate the use of portfolios in educational settings for different levels of education. This has led to different portfolio initiatives, some of which are more technology driven, whereas others focus more on introducing the concept of portfolios in education.

The first part of this paper gives a European review, which is not exhaustive, on the national and regional policies for the use of portfolios in teacher training. These policies are either already in place and implemented, are envisaged or only in their planning phase.

The second part of the paper concentrates on case studies of four selected countries presenting cases on how portfolios are used in teacher training. Each case follows a “scenario building” scheme that has been developed in the framework of the EPICC project.

The idea is that each case study includes a scenario. In a scenario the use of portfolio is described in a narrative form answering questions such as “how is the portfolio used by the learner?”, “who are the other stakeholders and what are the expected outcomes of the portfolio?”. Hence, the attempt is to look at the e-portfolio usage from different stakeholders' points of view, such as learner, teacher, tutor, recruiter, worker's unions, etc.

The final part of the paper provides a meta-analysis of the portfolio cases implemented in the presented countries. This includes the attempt to identify any emerging models, establish common characteristics of successful e-portfolio implementation, but also common challenges or drawbacks in the implementation of an e-portfolio.

Finally, the paper will attempt to give recommendations for the field - on policy and practice level- to create favourable framework conditions for the successful use of e-portfolios in educational establishments.

Download the paper in .pdf at:
http://insight.eun.org/shared/data/insight/documents/
e_portfolio_teacher_training_final_10_05.pdf


This work is part of the outcomes of European Portfolio Initiatives Coordination Committee (EPICC), a project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the e-learning programme. The paper is an input for Europortfolio 2005, Cambridge, UK.