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

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Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 17, 2009 at 5:22pm

Fabulous, Anne! Thank you for the message too! I was on a team that researched blogging platforms. I presented the EduBlogs campus, among others. What do you think of it? Has your experience with it worked well? Did you set students up with the work-around-gmail-thing under the teacher blogs?

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Permalink Reply by Jenn Johnson on May 19, 2009 at 8:00pm

I'm the Program Manager for an after school program and I am looking for a solution to display student work as well. I currently use Blogger (www.techstartstudentwork.blogspot.com), but have also set up a Wetpaint wiki as a trial (www.techstart.wetpaint.com). Note that the Wetpaint site is just a shell at this point.

The feedback I've gotten on my Blogger site is that it is too linear - people have to scroll down too far, not to mention dig through the archives for previous work. The feedback on the Wetpaint site is that the top horizontal navigation bar could be confusing for parents, donors, or anyone else who might come to the Wiki to view the work, but have no intent or permission to edit it. (Updates might be misconstrued as News, for example, when it is actually wiki site activity).

At this point, I'm posting the student work myself rather than the students due to COPPA compliance and trying to make sure we are following the guidelines for 3 different school districts, but eventually each teacher will be posting as well. We will be using Moodle starting in the fall, so internally the students will be able to store their work there, but we wanted to have something that showcased student work externally as well.

Anyway, I am new to Classroom 2.0, but I thought I'd chime in and show you what I've created so far to get some feedback and/or provide an example for you.

I feel like I'm almost there, but I guess my current struggle is that I want the best of both of the sites I've created thus far. That is, something that multiple teachers can contribute to (which is currently the case with both), isn't so linear like Blogger, doesn't have a wiki navigation bar that would throw off visitors like WetPaint or other wikis, allows uploading of docs, pdfs, images, videos, ppts, allows for comments/discussions with moderation options, and is entirely web-based.

I will talk to my IT team about Elgg and Edublogs, as they suggested installing WordPress on our server, but I'm not sure how that will be different from Blogger.

Cheers!

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Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 21, 2009 at 5:56pm

Jenn! We have so much in common. We will also be using Moodle but I wanted to have something that showcased student work externally as well. I have edublogs and am looking at wikis and one of the platforms shared in this forum thread. I've have too much to share so maybe we should just chat. Check out my page for skype and email info. and send me a message. Let's chat. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Mary Howard on May 24, 2009 at 2:42pm

Definately wikis. We are in the process of finishing up a literature circle assignment where we uploaded interactive web 2.0 tools in response to literature. I blogged about the experience: http://yoursmarticles.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

I've also showcased student writing assignments via a wiki (with student illustration).

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Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 30, 2009 at 5:44pm

Love your blog, Mary. So, which wiki platform do you like best and why?

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Permalink Reply by Nicole Gleason on May 28, 2009 at 2:23pm

I have a class wiki and a class blog and I think the class blog through classblogmeister is best. Each student has their own blog linked from the classroom blog. All of their work is in one location and students can add content and projects their selves. By the way, I am a second grade classroom teacher. Check out my class blog at http://tiny.cc/mrsgleason

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Permalink Reply by Donelle on May 30, 2009 at 5:42pm

Very nice blog, Nicole. Thank you for sharing. Love the Class Rain Forest Movie!

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Permalink Reply by Mary Howard on May 30, 2009 at 6:55pm

I really like wikispaces in that it is user friendly and easy to understand for the students (mine were sixth graders). They had a GREAT time decorating (adding widgets and images) and were still able to discuss and collaborate.

I'm not sure if this was helpful, but I'd LOVE to hear what you finally decide!

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Permalink Reply by Gail Potratz on May 30, 2009 at 7:28pm

I had my eighth grade LA kids use wikispaces pages to showcase their projects this year. I just use it because I haven't tried individual classroom blogs - next year's goal! Love how the wiki worked out. Need to use table to make it look good.

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Permalink Reply by Donelle on June 10, 2009 at 11:47pm

I am planning the individual blogs next year too. :)
Everyone seems to love the wikispaces option. Glad it has worked so well for you!
Thank you for the input!