Week 6: Organizing my 185 Students...One portfolio at a time!

So, I figured that this past week was as good of time as any to begin putting together personal portfolios    for all of my 185 students. This has several advantages of course, and allows for a sense of organization and sanity to the class bins which seemed to be overflowing!
This can tend to be a sensitive issue as students are fond of taking work home, though I need to collect for data and to show administrators and parents the results of my lessons. I tend to put roughly 70% of the work in folders, which I send home the contents every 3-4 months.
Each student receives a folder, and a period to decorate it. This time can be used to to review the drawing intro techniques of tracing, stencils or proper coloring techniques. They are free to color the front, back or inside. But I do emphasize that this folder will be holding their artwork, and presentation should be nice. What do you want people to think of your work when they see your portfolio?
Before giving them time to work, we visited two websites that I would like to share. The first was a site that explores several of the elements we have studied such as line, shape and color. You also can watch videos of serveral professional artists, one of which deals with our next unit, collage. The name of the website is Theartiststoolkit.com. The second website that I introduced them to was artpad.com which is a virtual painting pad. They loved the feature where you can watch the instant replay!
In my classroom, the folders or portfolios provide organization, data collection and provide assessment for grading. They are referenced with the parents during parent-teacher and give the students a sense of pride and ownership. Every art teacher has their own way of organizing the large number of student's work, this is just one example. Thank you for taking the time checking these out! Mr. Mac