What's the Best Platform to Showcase Student Work?

I am having a "virtual open house" for my students to showcase their work online. They are choosing several pieces of work to share, including traditional word documents, computer art, photographs of artwork and science projects, podcasting, video, and audio files. They are excited to share the link with out of town relatives and friends.

What do you think is the best way to showcase student work? A teacher's blog, student blogs, wikis, weebly, google docs? Any online portfolio tools that you'd recommend? The ability to post comments is important to me. Thanks for your help!

Tags: blogs, googledocs, student_showcase, wikis

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on May 3, 2009 at 9:40am

If you want it to be student centric and student managed, I think Elgg and Mahara are well suited as e-portfolios.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 3, 2009 at 12:06pm

I heard about Elgg at a presentation at CUE a few months ago. I'm not familiar with Mahara. I'll check it out now. Thank you for the suggestions!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Larry Ferlazzo on May 3, 2009 at 11:08am

You might find this useful:

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/05/19/part-two-of-the-best-s...

Larry Ferlazzo

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 3, 2009 at 12:15pm

Wow, Larry. Your website is just a wealth of information! I hadn't stumbled across this particular blog entry yet. Thank you so much for taking time to share. I'll explore those links from your post now. Thank you!

So, when you say you recommend EduBlogs, would that be you posting student work in your posts and they being able to comment? Or, do you recommend the model of having their student blogs linked under your EduBlog? I think I remember your telling me that you don't use the individual blogs for them, right?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Larry Ferlazzo on May 3, 2009 at 12:23pm

It depends.

For early ELL's, I use Posterous with links to each of their Posterous blogs on an Edublog I create, and the students post their work on their own to their Posterous blog.

For Intemediate ELL's and mainstream, Edublogs is the way to go in order to get comments, I think.

Larry

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 15, 2009 at 10:14pm

Larry,
I'm on your blog, looking for the FlowGram stuff you showed me a few weeks ago. Can you send me the link for the spot where you have that posted? Can't find it. ;) Thanks!!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by suehellman on December 6, 2009 at 9:56am

HI Donelle -- just saw this, but Flowgram is now defunct.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Tim on May 3, 2009 at 2:03pm

I think the easiest and fastest way to accomplish this would be using a wiki such as PBworks.com or Wikispaces.com (they both offer free wikis for educators with no ads and the ability to create student accounts). Each student can create their own page and then design it however they like. Both websites allow for commenting (PBworks comments are directly on the bottom of the page and Wikispaces comments are on a separate tab at the top). If you are concerned about allowing students to edit only their own page, both sites offer an upgraded package where you can set page-level permissions which restrict who can edit and/or view each page. This upgrade costs $99/year on PBworks and I think $200/year on Wikispaces. I use PBworks and highly recommend it, but I know others are equally passionate about Wikispaces.

I'm thinking about having my students maintain year-long portfolios for projects and labs next year using the class wiki. I'd be very interested to hear what platform you decide to use and how it works out for your classes!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 3, 2009 at 4:11pm

I was hoping for that option to allow students to edit only their own page, but wasn't as fond of the fees. I signed up for Wikispaces, but have not checked out PBworks. I would love to see how you organized that.

My goal was to start here, and then have my students maintain year-long portfolios next year as well. Trying to pace myself. Since you are looking to do that next year as well, let's keep in touch. I'll share when I have it set up. Thank you so much for taking time to give me feedback!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ann on May 5, 2009 at 11:46am

I've been using Wikispaces for almost two years. This is where I host my student projects. I archive the projects each year. I have an education account which removes ads from the pages. I have over 100 student ids. No fees. It works great!