The Potential of Collaborative E-Portfolios for Enhancing the Creative Teaching Skills of Pre-Service Business Education Teachers

Introduction

Recently, education and scientific research became one of the issues that nations and countries concern with, in spite of the different political, economic, social and ideological systems. That is because education leads the human development to achieve the social, economic and scientific development.

As it is observed that knowledge economy increases depending on the information revolution, it became necessary to concentrate on preparing generations of teachers who are able to produce and use knowledge in order to cater for demands of human development resources, (AL Hela, 2007). Furthermore, it is worthy that most countries spend more for preparing teachers in various fields. In particular, developed countries can achieve the continuous and real success in preparing and qualifying learners who are able to accommodate and adapt with information and communication technology. This can be done through presenting future solutions to overcome the problems of bad quality of preparing the teacher.

The teacher, as a major player in the educational arena, has to be given due emphasis and concern. In the 21^st century, his role differs from the previous traditional one. Abdelaziz (2012) showed that digital information technology contributes in changing the teacher’s role from just being a person who transfers information to a someone who is capable of acting as a facilitator, a demonstrator, an evaluator, a guide, a trainer, and an effective leader. Therefore, business teachers in particular should adopt and use the recent digital technologies in education and development to improve the educational practices, and should adapt to the requirements needed to make the best use of up-to-date technology, specifically those innovations relevant to business education, in order to prepare generations of learners who are able to benefit from the contemporary technology of learning and the professional development in the future.

Apparently, establishing and developing knowledge communities and the eLearning systems is an issue that requires developing teacher preparing programs. This can be done through experiencing with modern approaches for qualifying and training teachers and providing them with skills and capabilities which contribute to increase their abilities to carry out future job requirements. This can also be achieved in an educational environment rich with eLearning tools and approaches (Abdelaziz, 2014b).

Yet, current educational paradigms call for documenting the learning process and the teaching and learning practices. This probably will help make both learners and teachers alike become aware of the cognitive processes relevant to various pedagogical tasks. The e-portfolio is one of those tools and practices. This tool reflects the organized and rich accumulation of the practical activities that teachers and learners carry out. It is worth mentioning that the E-portfolio is a means for integrating information and communication technology in teaching and assessment. Recently, the use of portfolio in education has increased rapidly. This is probably due to the potential of this tool for documenting the performance of the teacher and the learner. It may also help boost reflective thinking, make learners become more active, encourage them to practice self-assessment helps learner to play an active and positive role in learning, and develops self-assessment, and achieve high levels of self-esteem (Barrett, 2010; Chau & Cheng, 2010).