A Website, A Showcase, A Vault

Wordpress.com, the safety of a vault

“I’ve done that, but don’t know where it is!”  Many times, I ask my students if they have made a video, written an article or a CV.  Most of them have, but some or many of them are unable to show me the document or item they have spent so much time producing–they have simply lost it or misplaced it.

I find that a website could work not only as a showcase but also as vault to save almost any work students produce in a centralized manner.

There are many advantages to this approach.

• Once you put an item online, it is rather easy to retrieve it since you could use one single site to centralize all your documents.  You would no longer have some articles on a CD, others in your computer, a poster you designed in your friend’s computer, etc.
• You have a very reliable backup just in case you lose all copies (mainly if you have Wordpres.com site)
• You can readily show people your work and share it with eventual collaborators by adding them as a user of your website or CMS
• A WordPress.com site would accept almost any sort of items including videos, songs, interviews, photos, drawings, PDFs, and certainly text
• You can set items to private and public, having full control over what you wish to share/show

WordPress.com offers all the advantages listed above and many more.

I strongly recommend to encourage students to use WordPress.com to showcase their work as well as to manage their work in a centralized fashion.