I’ve been looking recently at ways in which we can facilitate portfolios of work for students within the creative arts. To an extent, tools like Tumblr, Blogger, Behance are already well used, but they are used in isolation.
Social Media makes it easy to connect with other people through following, retweeting, repinning but it’s difficult if you’re just starting out and you miss out on the benefits of greater connectivity and collaboration with your peers that are offered by the tools.
The combination of Moodle and Mahara (Mahoodle??) is well documented, but it’s not intuitive and doesn’t lend itself well to visual arts applications.
Wordpress, though fairly bloated, is easy to setup and the Multisite functionality means you only ever have to up date one codebase, so I thought I’d see how the recent LTI integration worked with Moodle.
It’s a pretty easy setup thanks to dearborn schools documentation. I’d say about 15 mins including the WP install that we’re hosting elsewhere.
Form here, you can add a module/course blog that anyone enrolled on the module has access to and admin rights relate to roles in Moodle. So for example, lecturing staff can create and administer the blog and students can read and post.
It’s a nice, easy integration and I can imagine using this for course home pages and communication purposes, but not necessarily to provide or facilitate portfolios. Moodle’s blog functionality, that allows you to reference a private blog works better for this. We don’t want to be prescribing technology when the tools already in use suit the users better.