collection of items and information that illustrate and
represent the different aspects of the development of
the child Shores (2001). It supports the child’s educa-
tion, enabling the reflection of themselves, teachers,
and parents, helping them to understand the develop-
ment process and allowing them to keep a record that
can serve as a basis for the continuity of the work even
if by another teacher Neves and Moro (2013). Typi-
cally, portfolios are physical files of objects, including
text, images, collages, photographs, or videos. These,
due to their characteristics, do not allow easy access
to parents or the community, as it would be necessary
to be physically close to being able to explore and
understand it. Digital portfolios, on the other hand,
allow to store observations, comments, videos, pho-
tographs, and children’s work, as a basis for peda-
gogical documentation. Thus, the development of a
safe and free platform for the national community of
kindergarten teachers is of great importance.
In the approach of Mesquita and Lopes (2013), a
method for recording child monitoring observations
in a mobile application is presented. This observation
can store data such as text, images, video, and audio,
contributing to creating an electronic portfolio using
a smartphone or tablet.
Childdiary (2021) is a web-based platform devel-
oped for creating portfolios, examining recording rou-
tines, managing children on waiting lists, parental in-
volvement through individual messages, and sharing
documents and invitations to meetings. The system
has access via computer, tablet, and mobile phone,
however, its free use is limited. Functionalities such
as the number of teachers who can access the system,
maximum number of children, reports, and visibility
for Management or Coordination are examples of lim-
ited resources in the system.
In the SeeSaw application, it is possible to cre-
ate digital portfolios containing text, images, and au-
dio, in addition to allowing the export of the file in
PDF format (Seesaw, 2021). The tool can be used
by students to autonomously document what they are
learning, in addition to sharing the portfolio with their
teachers, parents, or peers. However, its free use has
restrictions, limiting features such as class activities
per teacher, creating multiple posters, saving work
as a draft, creating and sharing activities and student
grade-to-grade monitoring portfolios. Moreover, the
platform only supports the English language, with dif-
ficult use in other languages.
In another approach, the EduClipper platform can
be accessed through the web or through the iOS
mobile app Educlipper (2021). It allows creating
and sharing dynamic content, in addition to allowing
recording feedback on children’s tasks. It is also pos-
sible to capture and track the development and per-
formance over time in digital learning portfolios. The
application is free to use and has no paid plans.
Three Ring is an Android or iOS mobile ap-
plication, allowing you to document classroom ac-
tivities, create multimedia portfolios and share with
parents, administrators and other teachers (Santos,
2015). In the application, it is possible to capture
photos, videos, audios, and class notes, in addition
to having unlimited storage. The use of the platform
is free.
Easy Portfolio is an application for mobile iOS
and Mobile and does not have a free version (Port-
folio, 2021). In the tool, students and teachers can
capture and share their work, such as photos, videos,
audio and music recordings, web addresses, digital
documents, creating a digital portfolio.
Most of these tools focus on individual use, with
most of the features associated with storage and orga-
nizing. As stated above, on important role of portfo-
lios for early childhood education is to stimulate re-
flection on the child progress among all the actors:
parents, children, teachers and staff. For that, collab-
oration is essential, while maintaining a secure envi-
ronment (Lopes and Mesquita-Pires, 2014).
3 WEBFOLIO ARQUITECTURE
AND DEVELOPMENT
The architecture follows the guidelines for web appli-
cations, with three tiers (Figure 1).
Web
Backend
Web API
Client
Web/Mobile
Request
Response
MongoDB
Figure 1: WebFolio architecture.
The database is document oriented, based on
MongoDB. The access is performed, exclusively
through the Web Backend, that exports its function-
ality through a REST API to both Web and mobile
clients.
3.1 Analysis
The guidelines for the functionality arise from the use
cases.
The “Login” use case allows any authenticated
user to access the system. To log in it is necessary
to enter the user’s email and password. Then, it is
Webfolio: Secure Digital Portfolio for Early Childhood Education
477