By Sean F. Forrester, DTM
Chief Pathways Guide, District 48

I’ll be the first one to say it if no one else will – I hate paperwork! These days, most of us utilize computers at work and at home for many different tasks that once were done on paper. So, it seems counter-productive to me to choose the online version of the Pathways Learning Experience (highly recommended!), and then keep all your project evaluations and other Pathways paperwork off-line in a file folder or binder.

Thankfully, you don’t have to.

Built into the Base Camp software is a little function called E-portfolio. It is found by navigating to your Education Transcript (first button below ‘Welcome to Base Camp’ on Home Screen) and then clicking on the menu item beside Transcript called E-portfolio.

From the main E-portfolio page, click on the square titled Documents to find your own private document management system. Each member is given six folders, five of which are labeled Levels 1 through 5, and the last which is generically labeled My Documents. These are your personal folders and cannot be accessed by anyone else, even your Base Camp Managers.

There are some limitations to the E-portfolio. No document can exceed 20 Mb in size. File types can be Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, and most standard audio, video and photo images. Finally, whatever the file is named when loaded is what it will be named when stored.

Here is how I use the E-portfolio function. Whenever I am evaluated for a speech, I print out my Evaluation form on paper and bring it to my Evaluator. Once home from the meeting, I use my phone to take a picture of the first 2 pages of the Evaluation (the two written on by the Evaluator) and I save them to my hard drive, changing the name of each to something meaningful. Then I go into my E-portfolio, locate the level of the project I was working on, and upload the two pages. Voilà!

Additionally, I use the generic My Documents folder to store such evidence as my Club Coaching certificate, my Pathways Mentoring program documents, and even my Full Circle program tracker. In this way I have everything on-line and digital so when I need to review my Pathways paperwork with my VP of Education, they are only a few clicks away.

If you have specific questions about Pathways, please email me at [email protected].