An overview
Student-owned learning portfolios
Markee is a learning portfolio that a student owns for life. A class is how a student gets started, but the account belongs to the student, not the school. As students personalize their space, they learn real web design. As they add work and reflect on it, they build evidence of what they can do. Their teachers turn that evidence into verified mastery a future reader can trust. This overview explains the problem Markee addresses, how the platform works, and who it serves.
The problem
By the time a student leaves school, the record of their learning is thin and scattered, and most of it cannot follow them.
- A report card travels as a number with no work behind it. The reader has to take the grade on faith.
- A professional profile is self-asserted. Anyone can claim a skill, and nothing in the profile backs the claim.
- A school login stops working the day a student transfers or graduates, and years of work disappear with it.
- General portfolio tools sit outside the classroom, start empty, and ask a student to be their own motivation.
What Markee is
Markee takes the creative energy of an early personal homepage and points it at demonstrating real learning. Four ideas hold it together.
Owned for life
The account is the student’s, not the school’s. Classes affiliate and de-affiliate over time while the portfolio stays put and keeps its history.
Customization is the curriculum
Personalizing the space is how students learn web design. Visual pickers reveal the CSS they change, then direct CSS editing, then HTML layout blocks, unlocking by grade band and demonstrated skill.
AI that guides, never does the work
The coach explains a technique and points to the right control. It will show a single CSS property, never a finished stylesheet, and every session is visible to the student’s teacher.
Teacher-verified mastery
Projects and reflections become a draft mastery map. A teacher confirms, edits, or discards it. The result is evidence-based, not a self-asserted badge.
Customization is the curriculum.
How it works
The day-to-day is a loop. Each pass leaves a student with more work, more evidence, and a better-looking page they built themselves.
- 1
Add a project
An essay, a science-fair board, a Scratch game, a woodshop build, by upload or link. Portfolios never start empty.
- 2
Reflect
A short design-thinking flow: what problem, for whom, what you tried, what you would change. Reflections are versioned, so growth is visible over time.
- 3
Customize the space
Themes and visual pickers at first, each showing the CSS it edits. Then direct CSS with live preview. Then HTML layout blocks. The builder is the lesson.
- 4
Browse and react
Classmates visit each other’s spaces and leave bounded, moderated reactions. Seeing a cooler page is what sends a student back to the builder.
- 5
Verify mastery
A synthesizer drafts a mastery map from the work. The teacher reviews and confirms it. Claims reference projects, not grades, so they survive a school transfer and mean something to an outside reader.
The lifecycle
A portfolio lives inside audience rings that open outward as a student gets older. Guardrails are heaviest at entry and loosen with age, and ownership transfers fully to the student at the end.
- Me, the student alone
- My teachers, with active oversight
- My classmates in a shared class
- My school, when policy allows
- Invited outsiders, through scoped links
- The open web, a public handle
A sixth grader starts with heavy moderation and a few visual pickers. A graduating senior approves their own share links and, at graduation, claims a personal handle, exports everything, and stands up a permanent public portfolio. The space a student started at eleven becomes a professional artifact with years of verified, versioned growth behind it.
Privacy, safety, and ownership
A platform that holds a child’s work for years has to earn that trust in its architecture, not its promises.
Rendering that cannot bite
Customization is stored as structured data, not raw files. CSS passes a sanitizing allowlist, HTML comes from a fixed vocabulary with no scripts, and every space renders inside a sandboxed, cookie-less frame.
One place for every guardrail
CSS level, share-link creation, reaction visibility, and coach verbosity all resolve through a single capability check against grade band and the active school policy. Guardrails live in one module, not scattered through the code.
Moderation scaled by age
Uploads and text are screened before classmates see them, with flags queued to the teacher. Middle schoolers react with a sticker vocabulary; free-text comments unlock in high school, still pre-moderated.
History the student keeps
When a student leaves a class, the old school loses live access but the student keeps the timeline as portfolio provenance. Affiliations are recorded, never erased.
The coach is held to the same standard. A system-prompt contract, an output filter that trims anything copy-pasteable, and a teacher-visible audit trail keep it from becoming a homework-completion backchannel.
Use cases
For students
- A space that is yours to keep, past any class or school.
- Learn to code by making something you actually care about look the way you want.
- Carry verified, versioned evidence of your growth into an application or a job.
For teachers
- See real work and the thinking behind it, not just a submission.
- Confirm a mastery map instead of writing one from a blank page.
- A moderation queue keeps peer visibility safe without constant supervision.
For schools and districts
- Portfolios that outlive any single class, teacher, or student-information system.
- A consistent, evidence-based way to show what learning happened.
- Policy controls that scale guardrails by grade band, set once and applied everywhere.
How it is built
Markee runs as a single Next.js application on Vercel, with Postgres, auth, and file storage on Supabase, and the Claude API behind both the coach and the mastery synthesizer. The first version targets middle and high school with teacher-led onboarding and guardrails scaled by grade band. Row-level security in the database is the enforced boundary, so a student can only ever reach their own work and what their class policy allows.
See it for yourself
Open the builder to make a space, or join a class with a code from your teacher.
Read the full overview at markee.jamelna.com/about