Four Units
Cogitare brings the student, the teacher, the parent and the administrator together around a single portfolio — each with their own window, suited to their role.
This is the heart of the portfolio: learners build and document their journey through two complementary modules, Projects (project-based learning, interdisciplinary openness) and Academia (learning activities and hands-on work, with a five-step progression — I Searched, I Explored, I Went Deeper, I Master It, I Applied It).
Each project or activity appears as a central capsule that students can link to satellites representing the subject-specific and cross-curricular competencies of the QEP, with built-in tools (deadlines, webography, photo album, video clips, documents, messaging). Students record their intention, receive feedback from their teachers, and keep concrete evidence of their progress — all accessible through a personal access code, on a computer, tablet or Chromebook.
Teachers have a read-only portfolio that brings together their students' Projects and Academia modules, without ever being able to modify the content. Three distinct roles determine what they see: tutor (access to all of their tutees), mentor (responds to students' calls for help) and subject expert (visible only to students who have explicitly linked them to a specific subject on a given project).
Teachers can view work in progress, write structured feedback in a dedicated message thread (separate for each student, with timestamps and author identification), and track — through a visual indicator — the projects containing feedback the student has not yet read.
The parent portfolio offers view-only access to all of their child's work — the same structure as teacher access, but designed to uphold parents' right to consult the information collected about their child. Parents can see all projects and activities, including feedback exchanges with teachers, but cannot modify anything.
A separate communication thread, exclusively between parent and child, completes the unit; each child has their own access code (no multi-child accounts), to keep files strictly separate between families.
The admin area is the operational management centre for the school or school board: registering and managing students and teachers (bulk Excel import or individual entry), assigning tutors and course groups by subject, and managing student photos, institutional logos and the documentation centre (PDFs students can consult).
It is also the technical entry point for authentication (generating access codes) and for carrying data over from one school year to the next. Administrators do not view the educational content of the portfolios themselves — their role is structural: making sure the right people are linked to the right groups, in the right school, in the right year.