DartWrite is a digital portfolio initiative at Dartmouth College. Our goal is to make personal portfolios an important part of the Dartmouth experience for every Dartmouth student. With the generous support of the Davis Educational Foundation, we are able to give students personal websites that they control throughout their Dartmouth careers and after graduation.
The sites are built in the WordPress platform and hosted at journeys.dartmouth.edu.
Why portfolios? We think they represent a powerful learning tool for students and open exciting possibilities for faculty designing courses.
Reflecting on and Adapting Knowledge
Portfolios support learning. Done well, portfolios promote meaningful reflection about newly acquired knowledge and abilities; they help students draw connections across their many different learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Building a reflective portfolio will help students harness and adapt their knowledge and abilities as they encounter novel situations and challenges.
Showcasing Abilities
Portfolios are also becoming a more common expectation for hiring and for grad-school applications in many fields. Traditional academic transcripts can only say so much about the abilities and knowledge students develop, and it can be difficult to squeeze rich extracurricular experiences, foreign study terms, and research work into a short resume. The dynamic customization possible in a DartWrite portfolio allows students to present deeper portraits of themselves as learners, as creators, and as people. By the time Dartmouth students graduate, a robust digital portfolio can be a tremendous asset for launching life after Dartmouth.
Digital Composing
When faculty adopt portfolios in their courses, they can harness these benefits, promoting integrative learning and preparing students to showcase their work more effectively in the future. But we also think assigning portfolio work can foster greater rhetorical awareness and student engagement. Because DartWrite portfolios run on WordPress, student portfolio builders compose in a platform that looks and feels like the media they encounter online. With rich multimedia tools and the ability to adjust design settings, the platform can support exciting composing experiences that hone students' capacity to make informed rhetorical choices.
Get Started
If you’re a Dartmouth community member, we encourage you to visit journeys.dartmouth.edu. You can make a site and start designing.