The 12 school districts involved belong to a consortium known as the Southeastern Regional Education Center. The key is advanced planning and consumer research. Based on concepts of authentic assessment, Digital Portfolio software is used to create a multimedia collection of student work and connect that work to performance standards. To use digital portfolios effectively, educators and students must consider school goals, visions of assessment, technology support, logistics, and school culture. Digital portfolios have more meaning when a school community takes student work seriously and allows teachers, students, and others to reflect on what they have done.
Digital portfolios can be a first use of multimedia to help school engage in reform efforts.
42-45 Early childhood teachers face a unique challenge of integrating computers into their curriculum in a meaningful way. Two kindergarten teachers at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, New York, discover through digital photography that computers can be more than electronic baby-sitters. Children, for example, photographed a cooking class and organized the pictures into a photo book that they shared with their parents. The learned to download pictures and write their own text descriptions. The teachers found out that computers pose interesting opportunities and challenges in creative curriculum integration, classroom management, and fair and socially appropriate use.