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"To bodly go where no man has gone before..."

Or wait! Yes the Internet and it's digital portfolios have been explored before and after researching digital portfolios and digital tools for our explorations, we found out that, just like space it's seems infinite.

There are so many choices to make and also the choice of wanting or needing to pay for this services or not. There are many free digital portfolios to choose from and many of the best of those we found are free, and we made this one of our priorities. Below you will find a short list of our findings, the list feels like it could go on forever but at some point you have to just narrow it down. Some of these tools have a free trial or free version, but most are completly free. Happy exploring!

Offers the best-in-class, cloud-based Portfolio Platform in the market, whereby users can aggregate and showcase all digital evidence of what they have created, achieved and mastered. Our portfolio platform transforms individual and community assessment to make understanding the skills, achievements and knowledge of a person, or group, holistic, continuous and easy. Thousands of higher ed and k-12 schools, as well as companies, rely on Pathbrite to support student and employee success.

Carbonmade – http://carbonmade.com/

What started out as one designer’s frustration at the pain and expense of putting his illustration work online, Carbonmade has turned into home for nearly 400,000 portfolios. Though it doesn’t have the social media bells and whistles that Behance and Coroflot have, the fact that it’s a straightforward portfolio site that’s incredibly easy to use makes it appealing. Plus, it’s got a unicorn on the landing page, come on, that’s worth bonus points.

Crevado is an online tool which makes it easy for Artists, Illustrators, Photographers and other creatives to create an online portfolio so they can showcase their work online. With Crevado, it's also possible to sell your work online - our paypal and fotomoto integration make it super-easy to receive payments online for you work.

Coming from arguably the most familiar brand name in the world, Google Sites is an obvious choice. As with many of the company’s products and tools, Google Sites is easy to use and the kind of thing students can list on a resume later in life. It allows students to build a basic website using one of a number of available templates and upload files in almost any format to showcase their work.

Ms. Computer Teacher has a series of tutorials specifically covering how to make a digital portfolio on Google Sites that can help your students get started.

Evernote is easy to use across devices and offers a lot of functionality within its free version. It’s a good tool for organizing different files and notes, but less optimized for sharing or showcasing your portfolio than some of the other options on this list.

One nice benefit it offers is how easy it is to create different types of files within the app itself. If you want to add a picture or audio file to your digital portfolio, you can open up programs within Evernote to create them. That makes it easy to capture a moment during class or record something you see outside of class, and immediately have it categorized in the right place within your profile.

For more in-depth tips, check out one Portland teacher’s experience using Evernote for digital portfolios to work with elementary school kids.

Wordpress – https://wordpress.com/

Like both Google and Evernote, WordPress is a tool that it increasingly pays to understand in the business and work worlds. Students that get some experience with it early will likely reap the benefits long term. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to use for basic purposes and, like the other platforms mentioned here, allows students to bring files of all different types into the portfolio they create. Students can choose from a number of free themes and craft a site that fits their personality to help them feel more ownership over the project. They can use posts and pages to document their work throughout the year and revisit anything they’ve captured there later in life. Some students may experience a little bit of a learning curve in getting started with WordPress, but once a blog is in place, updating it is simple.

By the way, stick with WordPress.com here. The learning curve gets much more involved with WordPress.org, and you have to pay for each domain name with the latter. This page goes through all the steps to get started.

Edublogs offers a service very similar to WordPress, but is meant specifically for students. That makes for an easier interface, but a lot of the same functionality otherwise.

An Edublogs site can be set to private, so access can be restricted to just a student’s teachers and classmates if that makes the student (and more likely, the student’s parents) more comfortable. They also promise a lack of ads on all student sites, an issue that comes up occasionally with WordPress. And some school administrations may have WordPress blocked, which would make Edublogs a promising alternative.

These two options come pretty close in terms of how they work and can be used by your students, so check them both out and consider which works best for you. Edublogs offers a guide on getting started that covers all the basics.

Weebly is yet another platform that makes it easy for students to create a website using the visual template of their selection. The interface for making updates is very visually intuitive. It’s a little easier to use than some of the other options – images can be sized and placed using a drag-and-drop movement, for example. As such, it’s probably the better choice for any younger students.

Coroflot - http://www.coroflot.com/ No surprises here. Billed as “the largest, most established, most diverse pool of professional creative portfolios in the world,” no one doubts that this is one massive site. Launched in 1998, Coroflot hosts over 1.4 million creative images for over 150,000 creatives. There are no membership requirements, invites, or application processes. They also have a very nice and well-integrated job board. Bonus

You can browse a number of examples of digital portfolios students have already made to get some ideas. And this YouTube tutorial goes through the steps of getting a new site set up.

Taking place around the world from May 14th through 21st, but the site’s been on the radar for lots of creatives since they launched in 2006. Garnishing millions of page views a month, Behance lets you create a truly stunning portfolio connected that’s connected to the design community via activity feeds, groups, collections, etc. Not only is this site beautiful, it’s a truly effective tool to build your portfolio.’ Cargo offers their members a stunning way to create freestanding personal websites with their own URL, but it comes with a catch: you must be invited to join. Don’t be too disheartened, Cargo awards memberships to a number of people who contact them and share their work with the staff. The site is divided into both a front side, which is the public website, and the back side, which connects them to fellow Cargo members. Dribbble - http://dribbble.com/ Much like Carbonmade, Dribbble began as a side project, this time for Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm, one of whom felt he was a pro basketball player trapped in the body of a software developer (which explains the running basketball theme throughout). Designers share small screenshots of designs and apps they’re working on which can either be arranged in a portfolio or explored by screenshots that can be grouped by popularity, “debuts” (new submissions), or keywords. Users can comment and critique individual pieces. A really great, very easy to use site.


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