This past January I took a BC Campus FLO Microcourse with Jason Toal called “Please Share with the Class: Creating Online Gallery and Portfolio Spaces”. The course was really fun and relevant in terms of providing new ideas to create online spaces where students can collect and share their work. I really want to keep learning about and working on implementing my learning about online portfolios since ePortolios are one the eleven “High Impact Practices” in education.

By far the absolute coolest thing I learned about in this course was called SPLOT. SPLOT stands for “Smallest/Simplest * Possible/Portable * Open/Online * Learning/Living * Tool/Technology”. Simply put, a SPLOT can be set up in WordPress using the TRU Collector Theme which then creates a very simple website where students can easily upload image files and share short descriptions of them. In the course it was really neat to see the examples of the work past instructors had done to create collaborative student collections using SPLOTs, for example a biology instructor having the students share all kinds of images of different mushrooms. Students can add to a collection on a SPLOT by clicking on the “Collect” tab and uploading their image.

As our final project in the micro-course we were all challenged to create a small collection of something and then share it in an online portfolio. I practiced creating my own SPLOT and then used it to share an online gallery of AI-generated self-portraits. I called this WordPress site “On The Beach” in the URL so that I can reuse it for other kinds of collections, thinking about the little collections of stones and shells and bits of colourful garbage I might find on the beach.

I really look forward to finding a way to integrate my “On The Beach” SPLOT WordPress site into my teaching at some point when I would like students to collect and share images on a theme.

Image: The SPLOT logo from splot.ca