First, you will need to set up the Forum for the portfolios. Open your course and create a new Forum with an appropriate title; here we will use 'Writing Portfolio'. In the Forum Introduction, we will write an explanation of the purpose and use of the Writing Portfolio Forum.

When you are setting this up, make sure to change Forum Type to Each person posts one discussion. This will allow each student to set up their own thread to work with. This thread can continue throughout the course, used for a series of assignments, or it can be used for a single assignment.

For grading, and this will depend on your needs for your class, but for now, we will use the Count of ratings, which is important here because we want to make sure the students submit each of the stages of writing we will be going through. For grades, we will select an appropriate score from the Grade drop-down menu. For our example we will use 5, which will include a pre-writing stage (1), the initial draft (1), peer editing (1), a second draft, which will include teacher comments (1), and a final draft (1).

We will leave all the other settings as they are for now, then click on Save and display.

Once students enter the newly created portfolio they will see a button titled Add a new discussion topic. Clicking on this button will bring them to where they need to be to create their first entry in the portfolio.

In the subject line, I find it best to have students enter their name and the title of their writing since this makes it easy to quickly identify whose work you are looking at and what you're reading about.

In the message section, students will enter the text of the first draft of their writing assignment. This can be done in several ways. The simplest way is to type directly into the Message area in the forum. Some people are more comfortable typing in word processors. Typing in a word processor and then copying and pasting it is another option; however, this often includes formatting information that is invisible in the word processor itself. Occasionally, when copied and pasted in the forum, it can leave sections of junk characters at the top or bottom of the post. To get around this, you may open a simple text editor and copy and paste the writing from the word processor into the text editor, which can then be copied and pasted directly into the Message area. This will eliminate any of the formatting junk at the top or bottom of the post.

If you want to keep the students' documents in their word-processed form, you can have your students simply upload their files using the Attachment option under the Message textbox.

Once the writing has been successfully added to the Message area, students will click on the Post to forum button.

Once students post the entry, they have up to 30 minutes to edit. Once this time has elapsed, students will no longer be able to make any changes to the original posts.

Here is an example of an initial posting in the Forum from the instructors view. By adding the student name, here seen as Student One, and the title of the work to the subject line, you have immediate access to who and what you are working with. I know this may seem redundant since the profile name is located directly below, but some students may go by nicknames or change their profile names, which can occasionally cause confusion.

Once the 30 minutes for editing has elapsed, you can go into the post and begin to assess the student's work. For our assignment here, you, as the teacher, will not be making any comments yet. We will do a little peer editing. You should decide on partners for the students and have them enter their partner's post, read the post, and comment on it. Once the reply to the original post has been made, there will be a 1 shown in the Replies column, notifying the student that their work has been reviewed.

The student should then look at the new comments from their partner and make any necessary changes or respond with comments or questions of their own.

Here is an example of how this would look to a student looking at their first feedback.

Student One will then go back and make the necessary changes and repost. This could happen multiple times depending on the time available and the type of assignment the class is working on. When all peer editing is completed, the instructor would then go in and make some additional comments and assess the work.

This stage is one of the reasons why Forums are so good for writing assessment. As an instructor, you have the option to edit the content of the student's work. You can take a student's work and copy and paste it over to a new post in which you will be able to highlight sections you want to point out, change font colors or font type, underline text, and boldface certain points or for emphasis. You are also able to go in and make comments in the text itself. This is an important part of giving feedback and can be valuable to the writer.

An example of how an instructor has marked up a piece of work is shown in the next screenshot:

As seen in the previous screenshot, the student will be able to quickly spot points of concern from the teacher and know exactly which aspects of his/her writing need to be reviewed.

This technique is not available only to instructors. Peer editors can do the exact same thing, and should be encouraged to use this format to help their classmates in improving their writing.

Once the student has reviewed the comments and adjusted his/her work, he/she will be able to reply to the post and add his/her final draft to the same thread.

By using the Moodle Forums to create a series of steps in the writing process, you and your students will be able to review all the steps taken to get to the final draft. This, in and of itself, is a valuable tool for learning how to write and practicing the writing process.

If you decide to have students add files as attachments instead of adding the text to the Forum Message textbox, students should be able to use the track changes function in their word processor to do the same thing as we have just seen. It will simply mean that they will have to go through extra steps and the writing will not be immediately visible in the Forum thread.

You have four options on how to view the threads. You can display them flat, with either oldest and newest posts being first. You can also view them in threaded form, showing only the post you are currently reading with the others shown as links. The final option is to view them nested, which will show you all the posts nested in a chronological order.

Now we have only looked at one way to create a single thread in Forum, which can be used to hold all stages of a student's writing. There are, of course, other ways to set up portfolios. You could use the database module to file work away, you could use one of the contributed portfolio modules, or you might devise a way I haven't even considered. However, using Forums, especially if you have used them in your courses already, is a simple and easy way to set up collections of student work. What we have seen here is only an example, and there are other ways to set it up. Allowing multiple threads to be posted by each student is one option. What really matters is that you choose a way that will work for you and your context, as well as something that makes it easy for you to review and assess.