Turning WordPress into an ePortfolio

A portfolio is not built in a day.  It is a collaboration of a body of work over a period of time.  An ePortfolio works the same way.  As a teacher, we can't say, "Today class, we are creating portfolios."  The students will all look at you as if you have three heads.  
    
An ePortfolio has to be built up over time.  With students in the driver's seat of their presence on the web, we allow students to control their digital footprint, and utilize the power of web 2.0 to showcase their strengths to a specific audience: the world.  This year, my HS English students have begun their first steps (and mine) at using ePortfolios to represent their online profile as lifelong learners by using WordPress as their storage.  Although I have looked at a multitude of different options to house their portfolios, such as Google sites and Moodle tools, I am still a firm believer in starting with a blog for a number of reasons. 

One: a blog is transportable.  I teach at an International School where my students are transient.  I have 9 new students sitting in my class that were not there in December.  I need to provide my students with a tool that they can take with them to not just other schools, but other countries and region of the world.  If their ePortfolio is housed in Moodle on our school server, it will stay there.   With WordPress, students can take their blog with them, not just when they move but when they begin university and life in the real world as well.

Two: a blog allows students to edit.  You know what I am talking about.  How many times have you posted something and then realized you made a mistake.  Maybe it was a colossal mistake (accidentally writing something that is taken the wrong way by a reader) or a minor one (a spelling error), but we have all made them in our lives.  A blog allows the writer the freedom to go back and edit at any stage in the game.  Not only that, it allows writers to control when an item was published.  (This is my little trick that I may have used in the past when I was taking a few graduate courses and didn't want it to look as if I had completed 3 blog posts in one day.)  In GoogleSites, anytime you edit a document, the document is "posted" as your most recent item.  If a tenth grade student decides they would like to go back and edit something from 7th grade, do they really want their 7th grade Humanities report on Geography listed as their most recent learning?  WordPress allows them control.

Three: WordPress makes sense.  It is easy to navigate.  It allows a multitude of Widgets, control of your header, lots of freedom with the HTML code, and comment moderation.   And it is compatible with a multitude of other web 2.0 services on the web like YouTube and Flickr. 

So this brings me to this week in my classroom.  My students have been using WordPress this year to host their blogs.  Now, 6 months later, we are ready to begin transferring their blogs into ePortfolios.  I now have my students posting work from a multitude of classes across the curriculum.  They are comfortable with using WordPress.  Now the real work begins.  Over the next few weeks, I will take them through a variety of steps to transform their blogs into an ePortfolio.  Stay tuned for what will come next . . .