Assessment -- electronic portfolios

My third area for research and development this year is in the area of assessment. Letter grades are meaningless when it comes to holistic evaluation of all the skills and concepts involved developing the young theatre artist.

For years I've read about electronic portfolios, but was overwhelmed by the idea of creating and maintaining 95 of them. I think I've come up with a way to handle it that won't be too taxing.

This year, I'm implementing student showcases of their work at the end of each semester. Each grade level will have a performance piece that will be recorded and placed in the portfolio. It might be a monologue, a duet, a pantomime, a directing project, depending upon the grade level.
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I've had a difficult time keeping up with the electronic portfolio. The idea is good, but very labor intensive. I've been thinking it might be better to keep one tape for each students and add performances onto each tape.
Having reached the end of the first semester, we began recording the first projects in December. I decided it would be easiest to keep each class on a separate digital tape. I'm also taping them in alphabetical order. This will help me notice upon uploading to the computer if any students were absent or missed a taping day.

My 6th grade film class is helping me with the portfolio creation. Using iMovie, they are creating individual "movie" files for each student, with full name in the title and year they will graduate from my school. The students are uploading the segments, student by student, then saving the files to folders marked by year. We are saving the files onto an external drive with mega memory. Each time we tape work to go into the folders, they will be easily accessed and maintained in date order.

I plan to let students in 6 - 8 help with the maintenance of the portfolios and eventually give them more responsibility in selecting material to be taped and saved. The portfolios should give a very clear view of progress over time.