Using Student Blogs as Showcase Portfolios

I am a huge advocate of blogs as ongoing, reflective portfolios of student work. After using them with students for the last six years in a variety of formats in three different schools, I believe they are the perfect container for sharing, organizing and reflecting on student learning.

For starters, they are so amazingly easy to use. I’ve used blogs with students as young as third grade and it really only takes one lesson for them to understand the basics. Once they get the hang of posting, organizing their work in categories is a breeze and adding links and media are natural next steps. Plus, the inherent organizational structure (categories and tags), if used properly, makes it extremely easy and quick to find anything. The hardest part is ensuring that students remember to organize their posts.

In addition to the ease of use, the accessibility of connecting with other learners around the world, since work is online and easy to comment on, makes blogs a straightforward tool for building a global classroom. Considering how often our students move (usually every two years) the portability of a blog is another strong point. It couldn’t be easier to export a WordPress blog from one school’s MU to another or to the online wp.com. Finally, there’s the fact that blogs are so popular in the “real world” that they have immediate relevance to today’s media landscape.

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