Teacher Sian Jones at Lutterworth College Jones has been using itslearning for about a year and has seen good results with portfolio assessment. "Continuous feedback from the teacher and their interaction with students is the most effective way of stimulating student activity. Sian's approach is a very good example of this", explains it's learning educational specialist, Elisa Bjersand.

Sian describes how she has been using portfolio assessment:

"I have started using itslearning for my GCSE drama students to submit their written portfolio work on. In the past, in each class there would be one or two pupils who would choose to improve the written work after my marking and giving feedback on it. Now that I use itslearning not only am I not printing off written work support sheets but I am also finding that roughly a third of the group are choosing to improve their work. Each time they are improving their mark out of 20 by roughly 2/3 marks. As the grade boundaries for drama are high, for some this will mean the difference between grades.

I have found that students really engage well with the instant nature of the feedback and sometimes find that whilst I am marking other people's work that they are online so they read my comments, improve the work and then submit it again for me to remark. My top tip would be for the first time that you get them to submit a piece of work, get the whole class to improve the piece using your feedback. This gets them into good habits and shows all of them the difference that just a little bit of time makes to their final mark for that piece."

Good assessment is all about day-to-day work, variation and systematic effort. " The portfolio in itslearning offers students and teachers an arena for collaboration", says Bjersand. "In addition, active use of the work and e-portfolios is an excellent way of documenting a student's progress and development. "