Making my reflective ePortfolio

Computer or mobile device
Internet connection

In this activity, adults will learn to create and to maintain his/her electronic portfolio with all the documents, artefacts and productions made during the training course. Using the storage capacity offered by Google Drive in conjunction with the different production tools available in the Google Suite, adult learners will have an organised and personal space with all the relevant documents for reflection and demonstration of the learning achievements.

Keeping a file with everything used and produced in the training sessions is an effective strategy that adult learners should implement during a training course. Whether it is documents or texts provided by the trainer, tasks done, images collected or any other type of output, it is important that learners recognize and apply the behavior during training. This strategy can be seen also as a way to increase the self-assessment capacity of adult learners, allowing each one to analise and to select pieces of evidence that shows the learning achievements.

• To create an online personal environment
• To organise that space according different kinds of content
• To store and access to those documents online
• To reflect on the work done during the training course

Google Drive and Google Suite are available online and free for those with a Google account (https://www.google.com/). Google Drive gives a storage space where we can store different kind of documents. Google Suite includes a wide set of applications which allow us to create different kind of documents (text, spreadsheet, presentations, etc.).

Start the activity asking adult learners if they already have a Google account. If this is not the case, spend the necessary time needed to create Google accounts for each of the adult learners.

Then, you can show how to access the online space known as Google Drive and how it is at all like the disk management system of a normal computer. Show in particular how folders are created and how folders can be organized based on themes or subjects.

Following that, ask each one to access their personal space in the meantime created and to create a system of folders according to a criterion of their choice. After that, show how to save documents within these folders asking each one to upload any document stored on the computer where they are working.

Please give some time for adult learners to do the task and to feel acquainted with Google Drive. In this phase, you can explore also with them some other functionalities available and start to show where the Google Suite tools are affordable.

After all this preliminary work with the tool, is time to ask the adult learners to create a document from scratch with one of the tools available. The suggestion here is to ask them to create a text-based document, for instance, with a reflective synthesis about the work they have already done in the previous training tasks or other product that you feel that could be more appropriate to the moment. Ask them to create a document with Google Documents, where they also should include selected images or pictures previously taken to illustrate the points addressed in the reflection.

Finally, ask them to show the work they did to the other, reminding and underlining the importance of keeping up to date this new space, in the case, dedicated to the training sessions.

1. to assure that all the participants have a Google account
2. to create or access the Google Drive environment
3. to create there an organised system of folders
4. to upload and store existing documents inside those folders
5. to create and store different kind of documents with the production tools available in the Google Suite
6. to access and share documents online

Since google allows to work collaboratively on documents, it may be interesting to create a task where adults can be involved in creating a common document.

The security measures mentioned by Google Drive underline the importance of checking that the account is secure and not using the same password in different accounts. Regarding privacy, the IP address, software used, and user location are information stored in Google’s confidential data centers, which are only provided to third parties if you so authorize. Other information can be found in the Google Privacy Policy (http://www.google.pt/intl/pt-PT/policies/privacy/)