Teachers who publish their students' work online know just how powerful it is to give learners an audience. As a fifth grade teachers I started publishing student work online in 1998. Ten years ago it wasn't so easy to publish online and very few classrooms and schools had their own websites. I didn't yet have a classroom website, so I published where I could: Amazon.com. That's where I put book reviews by my students. I immediately noticed that the quality of their work increased because they were creating a project for a real purpose.
Today's students are doing more than written book reviews. They are making audio and video productions using tools like Audacity, PhotoStory, and iMovie. These products are usually played in classrooms, but often aren't published online.
For educators who want to show off the work of their students (or their own work) azk12.org has a feature you may be interested in: the
Media Showcase. The Showcase is a place where students and teachers can upload any media file (limit 30 megabytes) to share with others. These files could be projects in the form of text documents, audio files, and movies.
You should first check out some of the media found in the
Showcase. Currently, most media is from the Camp Plug & Play: The Creative Camp for Teachers. This is the Center's summer camp for educators and the campers have posted their final projects to the Showcase. You'll find digital stories like Kacie Cabrera's
Choices and Shannon Bermudez's
Light. Also from camp are several enhanced podcasts (which are like narrated slide shows). Check out Megan Montoya's
Wash Your Hands for preschoolers and
Roots, Suffixes, and Etymologies by Melinda Eslinger.
While the Showcase right now has mostly teacher created media, I really hope to see more work by students. In fact, anyone can submit a project to the Showcase by clicking the
Upload Media button on the
main Showcase page. You'll be asked to fill in a few blanks and then choose a file to upload. You can only upload one file at a time. Of course, the larger the file, the longer it will take to finish uploading. Before your media appears in the Showcase it must be approved. If you've uploaded something and it doesn't appear in the showcase after a couple days, please
email me.
Be aware that the Arizona K-12 Center will not publish media that contains copyrighted work. Anytime you publish online, be sure you have permission to use the sentences, images, sounds, and video that were created by someone else.
I'll often feature work from azk12.org's
Media Showcase in this blog. Having examples that students can examine is a great way to encourage their own products to be better. As the
Media Showcase grows, it should provide plenty of examples for students and teachers.
