Publishing Student Work: Google Sites as Portfolios

Giving students a place to publish their work online is an awesome incentive for producing high quality content. When they know it will be seen by someone other than the teacher, and even people outside of their school, it gives them a much greater audience and becomes a 21 century skill.

One of the first assignments I introduce to my students is to create a Google Site, and create an "About Me" page. This way the students start to learn the tech as they get to know each other through their sites.

As the year goes on, each writing assignment or project they complete gets posted to their sites (along with any other content they choose to create for fun) which becomes a portfolio of their work.

Periodically, I'll have my student post their links to Google Classroom so they can look at and comment on each other's work.

If you are interested in doing something similar, I've posted some of my resources below.

Creating A Google Site

This is a self-guided slide deck. I ask the student to go through it slide-by-slide (with headphones) and watch the videos and follow along as they create their own sites. This frees me up to trouble shoot tech problems, and answer any questions I might not have addressed in the slides.

Feel free to make a copy of either of my slide decks to use as you learn, or to use in your classroom (hopefully there aren't any typos).

Sharing To Google Classroom

Periodically, I'll post a "Question" on Google Classroom, and ask the students to paste the links to their sites in the "answer" space. Then, the students have to visit and comment (on Google Classroom) on a certain number of their classmates sites.

Student Example

As you'll see, I like to give my students a lot of freedom in their sites. They can choose whatever name they want, and post any (school appropriate) content on there, as long as they have an "About Me" page, and a "Project Portfolio" page for the work they've done in my class.

With permission from the student, here is his Google Site.

*Note: There is a setting where you can only allow people within your school district (email) to view your site for safety/privacy.