Tech Play 2 - Eportfolio Tools

I researched and played some websites/wikis for this week's assignment. I explored Weebly, Google Sites, and Wikispace web services to host my e-portfolio. Since I never used Wikispace before, it seemed to me a little bit complicated. I had experience with Weebly and google sites before. Weebly has nicer templates than Google sites, its easy to use and build an e-portfolio. However, I chose Google sites to host my e-portfolio. The reason is that, I use google's email service for my ETEC courses, and have done blogs for my other ETEC courses on blogger. Another reason is that, the school which I am employed is using Google based email service for teachers and students like TAMUC does, and it will be easy and familiar for me to have my students to build their e-portfolios on Google site because of their gmail-based email accounts. Google sites let me embed my blogs easily in my e-portfolio. Another reason is that storage size, and flexibility. Google gives 15 GB of storage for free for all google services. You can integrate your google email with Youtube, Docs, Calendar, Picasa and other useful google products. That's why I chose Google to host my e-portfolio. And one more thing, there are thousands of gadgets on Google you can embed them to your site. Basicly, with Google Sites, you can do;

• Single-click page creation
• No HTML required
• Upload files and attachments
• Embed rich content (integrate other google products like videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slideshows, calendar, etc)
• Customizable look and feel
• Dozens of pre-built templates
• Settings for accessing and sharing information

I think these affordances of Google sites would be best choice for me and for my students.

The link to the my e-portfolio site is https://sites.google.com/site/aktaseportfolio

When using this tool to have my students to create their e-portfolios wouldn't be a big problem. The reason is that, in my school students were given google based student email accounts. Also, each student is assigned a chromebook. Students are supposed to do a PBL(Project Based Learning) project, and create a website for their project. They are familiar with Google sites, because they used Google sites to create their websites before. However, Google has some disadvantages too, like you will not find stunning templates. If thats the case, my students are more than welcome to find alternative websites/wikis to create their e-portfolios which they comfortable with. There might be other websites/wikis better than Google sites, and I will continue my investigation to find the best one for me and for my students.