TECH PLAY # 2 ePortfolio Tools

   This week I have been exploring and play-testing with different eportfolio tools. I have looked at such sites as Wet Paint, Wix, WebNode, Simply Box, Portfoliobox.net, Posterous, ScapBlog, PBWiki, Carbonmade, Folio For Me. There were several of these sites that had been removed or were not available. But the biggest drawback or obstacle for me was their difficulty in using. If I were to present these tools to some Elementary kids they would have trouble understanding how to use these even with good instruction. The site I found with the most user-friendly tools was Weebly. It consists of click, drag & drop site creator, and it automatically saves all your work.
 
AFFORDANCES

   When I teach my students, it will be wonderful to have affordances such as click and drag, easy to find tutorial helps for every imaginable issue, image transfer tool, embedding code made simple, to teach how to create a web site for building eportfolios.  

CONTEXT CONSIDERED

   When considering blogs and eportfolios I have considered kids from kindergarten to high school seniors. I feel sure that by teaching early childhood how to navigate through Blogger, they wouldn't have any trouble knowing how to design their blogs. Now when I considered high schoolers, building an portfolio on Weebly would make them very happy to have the easy set-up of click & drag, image transfer, video, prezi, embedding tools, and a very user-friendly site. I would  teach them how to collect good artifacts to use, select the most impressionable to post, how to reflect on why they are using them and what they gained by doing this project then how to connect all the above together to make an ongoing eportfolio.