The Old Systems are Broken

No matter where you are in your education career, you’ve experienced a failed portfolio “solution” attempted by your school district.

Since 1990, software vendors have been ruining, in one way or another, the concept of digital portfolios for teachers and students alike. 

A brief history of the Digital Portfolio:

1990: Floppy disk
1995: CD-ROM
2000: State Department of Education website
2005: Class Blogmeister
2010: Google Sites
2015: Schoology
2020: Seesaw

School administrators have been sold network "drives" that store everything a student has done, that no one has ever seen. They've been pitched website creation tools that help students start a website that's never finished, at a dead URL. They've rolled out platforms to provide "transparency" by locking it all down behind a login screen. They’ve tried to document a decade-long journey by starting over every year.

We can do better.

A Portfolio for Every Learner

At Fanschool, as students publish articles, photographs, and digital projects in the profile & spaces, their publishing history starts to build up. Pretty soon, the author (student) and the teacher are both astounded at how much content and conversation are created every day, week, month, year.

The act of documenting the journey provides an automatic destination, whenever or wherever that occurs. Teachers, parents, and peers act as supportive team members, providing guidance, encouragement, and assistance when necessary, but ultimately allowing the student to lead the way. 

Flexibility in a Tumultuous Time

Whether you're in a public school, private school, microschool, remote school, hybrid school, or homeschool, students should be able to take their learning with them, publish projects in a consistent space, and publicize what they're proud of. 

The only tool that provides these capabilities is a digital portfolio.

Students become owners of this process, and the only one who, in an age of school accountability, will be accountable in the end for who they've become, with the help—or hindrance—of school.

Write it down. Share it out. Put a little dent in the universe.