E-portfolio and wordpress

In preparation for my visit to our Secondary English Student Teaching Seminar course, these links might provide some background from courses of similar structure: http://jbath1.wordpress.com/ http://kmeade1.wordpress.com/ http://emilysirotkin.wordpress.com/ http://mvdeutsch.wordpress.com/ WordPress allows for much flexibility and variation. Depending upon how you envision creating and categorizing content, your e-portfolios may look very different. I am speaking not only about the specific content elements, such as videos, observations, found resources, experiences, but also the theme that you choose to align the aesthetics with your content.

Easy media publishing

I’ve come across a variety of tools that I’ve been testing in my personal life as well as seeing how it may apply to academia. The first such tool is posterous. In a nutshell this is a quick blogging platform that allows for simple, yet elegant media publishing.

I co-teach a course for a group of honors students, and one of the exercises we have them do is to output a short powerpoint presentation to enable them to share the content on their iPods. I found this tool to be a tremendous asset for me to display their final output in a quick, relatively uniform way, also adding capability for them to critique each others content. I just gave them the post e-mail address, they composed an e-mail with their photos attached. I received a request to post through my e-mail as well as the posterous administrative interface, and after I approved the post, all the work was done for me.

On the personal side, I coached Ryan’s first grade soccer team this year. I used this as a tool, along with sms and e-mail to push updates as to when soccer practice was canceled, changes in schedules, etc. I didn’t formally ask the parents what they thought of my process, though for me it was major time saver.  None the less, we only lost 1 game the entire year. Go Magic!