Let’s Get Our Blogs and Portfolios On

Students at SSIS start using WordPress to blog and build portfolios in Grade 3. This continues until Grade 8. Once students reach high school, unfortunately, the process of blogging and building a portfolio stops. Blogging promotes writing to an authentic and broader audience. Any type of writing in any subject area can be blogged. Digital portfolios are a great way to consolidate and share learning activities, products, and reflections. Portfolios provide a wonderful means to show one’s learning journey. Even though they are not widely required yet, digital portfolios are becoming an excellent addendum to university admissions and job applications since they can show the actual learning and personal/academic growth that a transcript/CV can’t show. I think it’s time for high school students to get their blogs and portfolios [back] on!

If a high school student was here in middle school, their WordPress blog still exists, and any new high school student that comes to SSIS had blog created for them upon arrival. All high students’ blogs can be found on this page on the SSIS Link. Your students can start blogging immediately.

A system like WordPress can be used in a variety of ways. This Dragon’s Lair site is a WordPress blog, so this a great example of how a blog can be organized as a communication tool for a community. A similar kind of blog could be set up for a class, a whole department, or a club.

With the students’ individual blogs, students can use them as a portal to express their thoughts, opinions, reflections, and/or submit assignments. In the same way that what is written on paper in a class really has no limits, the same goes with the blog. The only thing to keep in mind, is that the blog has a published, public face, so helping students present well-proofread, written to the best of their ability, and appropriate posts is important. If done well, this provides a positive digital footprint for the students (i.e. if a student Google’s their names, what comes up in the search result? A blog/digital portfolio that revolves around a student’s learning is an excellent thing to find in that search).

The other great feature of blogs is the comment box which allows a discussion to occur or feedback give on the topic blogged. This is where students can get a lot of feedback about their work. If the student responds to feedback (comments can become threaded discussions between the author and visitors), it can also be clear evidence of their deeper learning and thinking.

In three of her Spanish classes, Sonia Ortiz is having the students do a music review activity via each student’s respective WordPress blog. Doing the assignment this way allows the students not only to present and publish their writing, but they can also embed images and video from YouTube to support visually the other elements required in the assignment. The blog posts will be published publically, so it’s quite possible these posts can inform people around the world about Spanish-based music and artists.

Organizing the student’s blog posts into categories makes it easy to transform their site into a portfolio. The categories could be labeled with subject areas, Sports/ASAs, or any other topic area about which the student will write and share more than once. Check out this post about getting started with digital portfolios. It’s easy to make general blogging and portfolio building go hand-in-hand once the student’s site is organized around categories and a clear navigation system is set up.

Bringing portfolios and blogs into the high school more explicitly will be a focus next year. If you would like to know more about the process now so you can explore WordPress over the summer, let me know.