The Northern Ireland education system has a well-established ICT infrastructure based on the ICT Strategy emPowering Schools (DE, 2004) and its predecessor the Education Technology (ET) Strategy (DENI, 1997). Together, these have set the policy agenda for training Northern Ireland’s 20,700 full-time teachers and ensuring that its 1,245 schools and 300,000 potential school users have a robust managed service that offers a suite of software titles, high-speed connectivity, contracted maintenance and hardware renewal.  Classroom 2000 (C2K) is the body responsible for procuring, maintaining and developing the ICT infrastructure and Learning Northern Ireland (LNI), the regional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).  Whereas the ET Strategy established and embedded the infrastructure (Clarke, 2002; Anderson & Stewart, 2004), emPowering Schools now focuses more on individualized learning, greater coherence across schools in the use of ICT, better use made of multimedia-rich resources and higher expectations for e-learning, online collaboration and e-assessment. For Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) responsible for Initial Teacher Education (ITE), emPowering schools offers the possibility of ‘Enhanced Professional Practice for the Teacher…’ (DE 2004:18) using e-portfolios to facilitate professional development.  E-portfolios can store media-rich personal histories; online dialogue with peers, colleagues, and mentors and a range of reflective accounts of their teaching, all of which can be used to identify pathways for future development. Of course, the notion of an e-portfolio is built on the traditional teacher portfolio, once the central component in providing “authentic assessment” (Darling-Hammond & Falk, 1997; Gensishi, 1997; Wolf, 1999). Increasingly, however, traditional practices are giving way to the emerging integration of ICT-based teaching with professional development, offering the possibility of a more rounded picture of teacher achievement through video, audio, blogg and interactive technologies. 

Our initial pilot (January – June 2004), involved a group of 40 Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students who used e-portfolios as a vehicle for assessing the application of ICT in their teaching (the other 125 primary and post-primary student teachers that make up the full cohort did not take part in this pilot study).  Linking the e-portfolio structure to the ICT competences enabled students to record evidence of a range of experiences, reflect on them and plan future actions. The participating students took their e-portfolios into their first year of teaching. When interviewed some six months after starting to teach full-time, some reported having used their e-portfolios pragmatically while others reported a more strategic approach to their learning.  The pragmatists used their exemplar materials as resources or stimuli to develop previous teaching programmes or to adapt to the new situation. The strategists went further by using their e-portfolio as a catalyst for dialogue with their new colleagues, some in planning new programmes in collaboration with their colleagues, and others to help identify their own professional development pathways.  Figure 1 shows an example of the e-portfolio. This first pilot established many of the developmental issues and taught us how to begin to articulate the process of reflection while providing a vehicle for assessment and evaluation. 

Figure 1:
Student teacher ICT-based e-portfolio

Its main weaknesses were twofold. First, as a discreet file, it simply automated what other students were doing on paper and was not easily shared or integrated with other file formats. Second, it recorded only one competence area (ICT in teaching) and left other areas of competence such as teaching and learning, assessment for learning, classroom management and professional knowledge (http://www.gtcni.org.uk) to be assessed through traditional essays, portfolios and coursework. Naturally, then our next challenge was to apply the lessons learned to the complete range of competence areas. These challenges included how to integrate the e-portfolio into a more comprehensive assessment profile, how to build its activities into the course structure and how to support reflection in a range of competence areas.  

During the year 2005-06 we had been introduced to LNI, which offered the secure and integrated environment we had been looking for to expand and develop the e-portfolio depth and scope. The key developmental decisions were in relation to structure and process (Figure 2). Structure involved ensuring that the e-portfolio integrated with all the UU course requirements as well as the expectations of the teaching profession (represented by the oval areas in the diagram). Process involved ensuring that students could easily gather evidence of competence in ways that would facilitate dialogue with tutors, peers and teachers. The most effective way to do this, it seemed, was to reflect the themes (represented by the rectangles) derived from the General Teaching Council of Northern Ireland (GTCNI) framework of teaching competences.  In terms of appearance, the rectangles also represent the web-pages that would open to users and viewers.   

Figure 2:  A Model of e-portfolio development

Central to the structure was the ability to integrate LNI’s collaborative tools with the e-portfolio, giving it the ability to act as a catalyst for professional dialogue with HEI tutors, school personnel, peers and others. The e-portfolio also gave a focus for linking assessment with reflective practice in ways that would allow students to build an ongoing account of their development (something that did not happen with ‘essay’ type assignments). Students reported that they found the format and structure easy to use and agreed that linking assignments into the e-portfolio enabled them to target more precisely their professional development needs and approaches. 

This, then, was the second iteration of our work and it has been instrumental in securing funding for a Northern Ireland-wide initiative to seek agreement on a specification for a teacher e-portfolio, the Te-P project. The major stakeholders (HEIs, the Regional Training Unit, The Department of Education and the GTCNI) understand that to promote coherent professional development there needs to be agreement on the nature of evidence of competence, how that evidence is used to support teachers and, of course, the technical issues of sustainability, interoperability, storage and so on.  Allied to all these issues is the major challenge of building a community of teachers and leaders who have an agreed understanding of the nature of professional development and how it is best represented, discussed and supported. While there are differing views on the nature of e-portfolios and many metaphors used to describe their function (for example, Barrett (2004) lists among them a mirror, map, sonnet, story, journey and a laboratory), the Te-P group seeks simply to focus on how e-portfolios can facilitate the joint processes of personal reflection and professional dialogue. Thus, any one metaphor could easily be used to describe how the students plan, teach and evaluate their teaching, and how they collaborate. What is important is not that we all agree with one single definition, but that we all agree that, at the root of what we seek to do, the effective and coherent professional development of teachers and teacher leaders, we agree that professional development itself is a lifelong process, a shared responsibility and a quest for excellence in a range of contexts that constantly change. The tools needed to support this must be based on an agreed principles of use about what an e-portfolio is and about how, when, why and with whom it should be used. It is therefore crucial that teachers have at their disposal a set of tools that will allow all these core activities to grow and influence their personal and professional effectiveness. 

References
Anderson, J., & Stewart, J., (2005), Relevant, reliable and risk-free. In M. Sellinger (Ed.), Connected Schools. London: Cisco Systems.
Barrett, H., (2004), Metaphors for Portfolios, http://electronicportfolios.org/metaphors.html, updated November 2, 2004, Accessed December 2005.
Clarke, L., (2002), Putting the 'C' in ICT: using computer conferencing to foster a community of practice among student teachers. Journal of Information Technology in Teacher Education, 11, 2, pp 157-173.

Darling-Hammond, L. and Falk, B., (1997), Supporting teaching and learning for all students: policies: policies for authentic assessment systems.  In A. L. Goodwin (Ed.), Assessment for Equity and Inclusion: Embracing All Our Children. New York: Routledge.

Department for Education and Skills, (2005), Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services, Nottingham, DfES Publications.

Department of Education, (2004), emPowering schools in Northern Ireland, Bangor NI: DE.

Department of Education for Northern Ireland, (1997), A Strategy for Education Technology in Northern Ireland, Bangor NI: DENI.

Education and Training Inspectorate, (2005), The Reflective Teacher, The Department of Education, Bangor, Crown Copyright.

Genishi, C., (1997),  Assessing against the grain: a conceptual framework for alternative assessments.  In A. L. Goodwin (Ed.),  Assessment for Equity and Inclusion: Embracing All Our Children. New York: Routledge.

Wolf, K., (1999),  Teaching portfolios and portfolios conversations for teacher educators and teachers. Action in Teacher Education, 17(1), 30-39.