Moving your brag boards from offline to online is a great way for you to connect with parents and students on a regular basis.
In most classrooms, you will see a bulletin board or wall covered in student work, often called a “brag board”. They make the kids feel good and validates their hard work, as well as gives the teacher something to point to during parent conferences or walkthroughs.
Portfolios, if you are having students keep them, don’t really serve the same purpose. They are cumbersome to display and might contain work that, frankly, isn’t that impressive.
But as student work moves increasingly to the online space, with learning management systems and blended learning tools, how are parents and other stakeholders supposed to view students’ work? Luckily, there are a few solutions for that.
Evernote
Evernote has become the de facto king of online information saving and storage. Smartphone and web browser apps help people clip everything from handwritten notes to photographs to webpage links and much more. In this way, a teacher can integrate students’ online work with their offline, physical work, and then share the results.
Kidblog
Writing is becoming crucial across the curriculum. The Common Core has recognized that every subject area has a stake in kids learning how to write for an audience in each discipline. Students of this generation might find blogging more engaging than traditional pencil-and-paper work.
Kidblog offers a safe, scalable alternative to “adult” blogging sites like WordPress, tumblr, etc. Not only are those sites complicated, but they are also open to the world. Kidblog, on the other hand, is controlled by the teacher through administrative access. Each blog is private by default, only viewable by the classmates and the teacher and only shareable by the teacher. The functionality and creative output is what you’ve come to expect from any other blogging platform.
Educlipper
Teachers are particularly infatuated with Pinterest. There is no shortage of lesson plans, worksheets, and resources that teachers have pinned and repinned. But Pinterest is wide open, a true social network in the largest sense possible.
Educlipper sometimes scoffs at the comparison to Pinterest, but it’s accurate—with one distinct difference. Educlipper has been designed from the ground up to be used by teachers and students for educational purposes. Through the creation of clipboards, teachers can organize relevant information and then share it with the class. Students can organize their research and collaborate on projects, then share them with the world. It handles links and pictures, just like Pinterest, so pretty much anything can be posted.