I spent the morning today with Stephen Palmer (pictured above) who is the ICT Manager at Essendon North Primary School here in Melbourne. Stephen is a remarkable young man who, in addition to managing the entire network of computers at ENPS, is also responsible for the development of an innovative ePortfolio tool which goes by the name of EdCube.

Created in Java, this product provides young students with the ability to arrange their portfolio items in a very intuitive way – see this example of the contents page from a sample portfolio created in this environment. Each of the titles listed in this contents page is linked to a page (dynamically created) containing samples of student work and their commentary about it.

Students can “place” files into their portfolio regardless of file format – Stephen demonstrated with a BitMap graphic that was converted to a JPG within the tool for example. The tool handles all sorts of file formats in this way – including audio and video files.

EdCube is currently being used within Essendon North School, and is also being trialed in a number of other schools within Victoria. Will be interesting to see where this may lead.