Electronic portfolio has been defined by Wikipedia as collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the web. Originally I thought of electronic portfolios as collection of professional examples of projects or skills, but portfolios can be not only professional/hobby based but also educational.  Portfolios can be viewed as learning records that shows students’ progress and achievement in the course or program. As you can see from the image on this page, creating portfolio usually involves following processes: collection of evidence, reflection, organization and publishing, collection of feedback, revisions, assessment and collaboration; and many tools can be used to present and publish e-portfolio online.

In this unit of the course we are getting familiar with e-portfolio concept, analyzing and selecting tools for our future MEd portfolio and for reflection-assignment in this course. I have reviewed following technologies proposed by class instructor and my classmates and below you can find my analysis on each of them:

• Mahara (Athabasca University portfolio.elab project): is great but complex tool for building an e-portfolio. It offers good variety of building blocks for e-portfolio but presentation is quite simple and not intuitive. Athabasca University offers support for this tool and it is free. Students will have access to their portfolio after graduation and can manage access to their profile for external viewers.

• Athabasca University Landing: is University social networking tool that can be also used for building an e-portfolio. Based on my understanding access to the Landing pages is given only for Athabasca University students and staff and no outsiders are allowed to view the pages, which will create a barrier if students want to present their portfolio to external users.

• Wix.com: is a web based tool for creating and hosting websites. This tool is HTML5 based and very intuitive for users. Because e-portfolios are basically pages on the web that contain collections of digital objects, students can create great looking and estheticaly pleasing portfoflios and host them with Wix for free (at the time of the review January 2014).  Wix has big variety easily customised templates available for site creation.

• Weebly.com: is very similar to Wix by functionality, design and it is also free.

• sites.google.com: is also similar to Wix and has been around for a while. Good thing about Google sites is that it is part of Google services such as Gmail email account, Youtube and other Google tools. That makes it easier for those who already have Gmail account.

• Joomla.ca: is open source content management system which helps users to built interactive websites. Unfortunately, joomla website does not contain a lot of useful information for evaluation of its services and requires you to download software for building the website.

• Adobe Acrobat: is a nice resource for people who are more comfortable to build their static portfolios in PDF. Although Adobe Acrobat can be interactive it requires download of software and it is not free.

• Microsoft Word: is another resource for building static portfolios. Most of the PCs comes with Microsoft Word (it is not free) and people are more comfortable in using this software as it has been around for "ages". MS Word's documents can also be interactive.

Based on analysis of e-portfolio tools above, I can group them into 3 groups: e-portfolio software, website building tools and document creating software. All of them have their advantages and disadvantages. I think that e-portfolio software provide some disadvantages as they are limited in creativity, often tied to organization or institution and offer less flexibility. Document creating software are often not free and mostly produce static documents. I chose to use  e-portfolio Wix.com for this course, as it offers me flexibility will allow me to show my creative side.

Analyzing the e-portfolio concept I also came to conclusion that it can be simply considered as web-page/site or even in some instances a simple blog. So I do believe there are much more tools out there that can help people to build their e-portfolios: professional, personal or educational.