In the discourse on children and early childhood education, the concern to 'give children a voice' has become increasingly important in recent years. The starting point for this development is the idea of a 'competent child' whose perspectives, perceptions and ideas are valuable and important. For this reason, ECE has set itself the goal of attentively listening to children and taking them seriously in the sense of democratic, inclusive and participatory pedagogy. Pedagogical documentation has been identified as an important tool to achieve this goal. The following article first of all critically examines this claim. Subsequently, results of an analysis of analog and digital portfolios are presented. It is shown that the differences between both portfolio variants are very small. Rather, the pedagogues translate the forms of portfolio entry design familiar from analog portfolio design into the digital process