Evaluation and further development of an e-portfolio system (EPS) for initial teacher education

Resulting from the evaluation of the in-house electronic portfolio system which included the development of evaluation forms for trainees and tutors and capturing over 4000 words of comments, recommendations are made regarding the development of an e-portfolio system for initial teacher training. Revisions undertaken to improve the user interface included; enhanced memory, storage, backup and server provision; labelling of links and actions; more icons for file types; file upload and disk usage limits to increase to 50MB; shared folders renamed and repositioned, improved monitoring of emails for tutors; zip files of whole directory structures to be uploaded and easier folder deletion. Implementing this for tutors and for trainees is seen to be an effective way forward to learn about and experience a secure, monitored, flexible and efficient building and sharing of electronic resources.