I have been looking a lot at how we could setup an Eportfolio using WordPress a short post on why.

In 2010 I had students create a portfolio using WordPress. Earlier this week I resurrected one of the blogs created by Justine so the grade seven team had an example of what a blog based portfolio looks like. Although she is no longer at SSIS you can see this on her blog:

• comments from teachers from other countries via #commentsforkids and twitter (Special comments)
• exploration of digital literacy with her posts on Facebook Privacy and Digital Identity One and Two
• a series of, self selected, reflections for her eportfolio that shows that she could embed pdf files and videos she created in other classes. She has a number of these I have selected one that has both a video and a pdf file embedded in the document.
• human rights presentation from Humanities Class
• blog post on a collaborative programming project that she took part in with a Middle School in Michigan

The educational benefits of portfolios are obvious.

As a parent the benefits are obvious as well as you can see in the presentation below of parts of my son’s portfolio from 2006.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Blogging Cycle

I wrote before about my thoughts on blogging, Diigo and Zotero. I created a cycle that I wanted the kids to go through with their blogging (I like mind maps). The cycle is fairly simple, students are given a reading, they use Diigo to mark up the document to create sticky notes and then use the sticky note to form the basis of a blog post. I like having them add a research part to this as well so I ask the students to find two other related posts then add the posts either as a quote or links.

I am looking at this once again so I can add the process to my Unit planning. The blog posts are fairly easy to track via RSS feeds but to see if the students were using Diigo I had to go to my teacher managed account and check to see that the students had bookmarked, added sticky notes and tagged the reading. I started doing a bit of research to see if there was a simpler way and found that I could RSS feed a Diigo tag. That means if I go to my groups and look for the tag like I have shown below. I can easily see all the sticky notes that have been added to the document.

groups.diigo.com/group/SSIS_ICT_8E/rss/tag/AOW

I kept the bookmark public and the sticky note private. Will try this out tomorrow with my students using a variety of combinations of privacy settings  and hopefully it will be one more thing to add to the Rubicon unit.

Related articles

• 12 Reasons Teachers should use Diigo (resourcelinkbce.wordpress.com)
• I’m Diggin’ Diigo! (sharonpslibrary.wordpress.com)

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I took an online course a few years back through an educational consortium in British Columbia. The course was lead by Helen Barrett. Since then I have been exploring how a blogging system might be used as an electronic portfolio. She recently wrote that:

Blogger is clean, simple, easy to use; I find the WordPress interface to be more cluttered, complex, but I can see its advantage for institutions that want to host the system on their own servers. For me, the major difference is that I can embed audio, video and slideshare files into my Blogger blog…

link: E-Portfolios for Learning

Our school has created an eportal system using wordpressmu, moodle, google apps and a mindtouch wiki. The thought being that the more we use internal tools the less the impact there would be on our bandwidth. My first semester attempt using Edublogs was not the greatest due to bandwidth issues. However, our kids, grade 6 though 12, have had a year and a half experience using WordPressmu and are becoming adept at creating and embedding content with this tool.

The nice thing about having a wordpressmu install is that you can do all sorts of interesting things in terms of aggregating the students content (most of this I learned from reading Jim Groom describe his work with the University of Mary Washington blogs) . I wanted a system that was student driven and everything happened at the student blog level. They are creating an online identity for themselves through these blogs. I  also wanted, however, to pull certain blog posts into a portfolio blog.

I started this in two different places:

• A blog created specifically for the purpose of gathering artifacts for an Portfolio (Efolio8 @SSIS)
• Bringing student content into a course blog (ICT10 blog)

Next step is to better understand how child themes work and to better understand the aggregation of content and how this would all come together site wide. Also need to see why UBC’s add a link plugin no longer works.

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• My Top 5 Tools for Learning Logs (boisebarbara.org)
• WordPress a Better LMS (profhacker.com)
• My Top 5 Tools for Learning Logs (coolteachers.org)

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“I like peer editing this way” …… I am frequently surprised with what kids like.

Started having students go through a revision process that included using Diigo to markup articles and peer edit their classmates drafts. So far we are using yellow highlights for key ideas, blue for vocabulary and pink when peer editing (key ideas and vocabulary came from @rappino). Students also need to add a sticky note to describe what they thought needed to be edited. Seems to be working quite well so far.

teachNbabble - just a place to babble (photos: scenes from our travels)

There are a number of different ways you can use a wordpress blog in a school. Blogs, for example, can be setup as content management systems, for recording class activities, growth portfolios, photoblogs, to chronicle an activity, to organize groups and to highlight activities in one area of the school.

A common use of a Blog is to extend the classroom creating a space where students can discuss, react, expand, collaborate or even rant. Over the past five years of using wordpress in the classroom I’ve seen three different possibilities when helping a teacher setup a blog for this purpose.

A teacher (T) blog where the teacher published different prompts and had students comment on the prompts. To work with a system like this I usually needed to show the teacher a few basics, such as creating posts, pages and link categories. This is an easy system for a teacher to manage as all they would have to do is read the comments. However, in terms of adding to a students Digital Identity this system does little.

A teacher-author (TA) blog where the teacher or the students could write about whatever they choose. In this system students are given the roles of authors. A little more to do in terms of helping the teacher. There would be a need to show how students with author privileges could be added to the blog, as well, as, looking at different strategies that might be used to read and organize student created posts. As in the previous example, the teacher would have control over theme choice, adding masthead graphics, adding and placing widgets: personalization of the blog.
Again this is an easy system to manage. The teacher, as the blog administrator, controls all aspects of the blog. Students could be assigned to a category so finding what each student was writing would be fairly easy. As authors, students could create their own posts or react to a teacher prompt. With this system a student again would not add a much to their digital identity. Although the student has more independence than the previous system the blog essentially belongs to the teacher.

A student (S) blog where the student has their own blog. The teacher would not have to do anything, in terms of, setting up student accounts. However, more work would need to be done to read student created content. At a minimum level a teacher would need to visit each blog to read student writing. In addition, consideration would have be given to creating a blogroll so that navigation to the students blogs is made easier. With a little more work the teacher could be taught to understand how RSS feeds could be used to aggregate student content.  In the end, this system would require more assistance on my part and more work on the part of the teacher. In this system, however, the student controls all aspects of the blog. The blog itself becomes an extension of the student as even personalization of the blog is totally up to the student. In this setup the blog offers a student the opportunity to show a different aspect of their digital identity than might be shown with other online tools the student might be using . The blog also is portable can be taken off of the school system and moved.

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