Introduction

Digital Portfolios Made Easy is a portfolio system developed by Dr. Leigh E. Zeitz and Andrew E. Krumm. It provides a system for presenting digital portfolios that is complete but simple.

The growing interest in electronic and digital portfolios has created opportunities for practitioners to present portfolios that are more rich and interconnected than the traditional notebook professional portfolio. The greatest obstacle to creating digital portfolios, however, can be the practitioner's perception of the technology itself. The technology does not need to be overly complicated, and the goal of DPME is to make the process as transparent and intuitive as possible. The DPME templates provide a framework within which to build a standards-based, individualized professional portfolio. The DPME templates are provided in two formats, Word and HTML. These two formats allow practitioners of all skill levels to use software that most already have on their computers.

Creating your own digital portfolio can seem like a difficult task. The toughest part of creating any portfolio is selecting the artifacts that you want to include. It is difficult to decide how you can best portray your professional self through a collection of artifacts that you have created and accumulated over time. Once you have identified your collection of artifacts, you need a format to organize and present your materials. The DPME templates can aid in the development of your digital portfolio by providing an intuitive framework that emphasizes the artifacts and their meaning to your professional development.

• A new DPME template is now available: xWord. It builds upon the previous successes of the Microsoft Word templates with the addition of Microsoft Excel. The ease of use of the Word templates has been attractive to practitioners across the country that sought an approachable digital portfolio format. The new template format removes repetition from the portfolio creation process and creates new possibilities for aligning artifacts with multiple forms of standards.