Here are some exercises that will help you to prepare for your portfolio work.

Exercise 1

Produce a Student Profile showing all your details. You'll need to scan a picture of yourself and insert it into your profile.

Task 2

Get hold of some file dividers and label them appropriately. We've given you some advice, but you should also have a chat to your tutor/teacher about what you should naming each section. It's also a good idea to think about what evidence will go behind each divider. Either write these ideas in pencil on the dividers or on a piece of paper, which you should hole-punch and place in your folder. Never slip pieces of paper into your folder without hole-punching them, as you'll probably lose them.

Task 3

Produce 3 screenshots of automated routines. For example, you could use these to prove that you've researched on the Internet, numbered your pages for a report, produced headers and footers in an essay, animated a PowerPoint presentation, used Lookup tables or the graph wizard in Excel, etc.

Task 4

Produce a screenshot to prove that you have sent an email to your tutor/teacher and attached work for marking. Screenshots are a good way to save printing too much information and wasting paper and print ink.

Task 5

When you've finished your project, evaluate the 4 areas of competence by making a list of the things that you can now do, that you couldn't do before you started your project. Here are a few examples that may apply to you.

• Attaching work to emails
• Communications - presenting your work in front of an audience, perhaps by using PowerPoint for your presentation.
• Number - producing the correct graph for the presentation of data using Excel.
• ICT - using search engines on the Internet effectively, or formulae to search a spreadsheet/database.

Compare your list with those of your friends, or show them to your tutor/teacher.