12 Free Online Apps to Get Your Students Publishing

Schools are beginning to transform their assessments from standardized testing, to e-Portfolios.  According to the list of 21 Things That Will be Obsolete in 2020 by Tina Barseghian, The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions came in at number five! Barseghian writes, "The AP Exam is on its last legs. The SAT isn’t far behind. Over the next ten years, we will see Digital Portfolios replace test scores as the #1 factor in college admissions." It will be important for your students to begin creating an ePortfolio so they will be Ahead of the Technology Curve by the time schools start using this new form of assessment.

I am just starting to emphasize the importance of e-Portfolios to my students by allowing them to start making a collection of their projects.  I love the fact that instead of saying, “hand in your assignments,” I can now say, “publish your assignments and send me the link.” With this mentality, my students will think about connecting and sharing their learning with the world around them.

Here is a video that shows how students use ePortfolios and the benefits associated with them.




Below are my favorite online applications to Get Your Students Publishing!

Yudu Free is possibly the best online publishing application out there. Students can explore by browsing the YUDUfree library for publications, images, audio files & bookmarks of interest. You can also publish your documents, upload audio, images and bookmark your favorite websites. This could potentially be a great place to start creating an ePortfolio.

AuthorStream is the best way for your students to share and publish their presentations such as PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentations on the web, in my opinion.  Not only can you upload your presentations and embed them in websites, but you can also create a video of your presentation, which is a feature that other competitors do not offer. In addition, AuthorStream uploads all of your media files into the presentation such as audio and video files which is extremely convenient productive. 

Issuu allows your students to explore a world of publications by people and publishers alike. Students can collect, share and publish in a format designed to make their documents look their very best.  This is a great application for students to create online magazines and books and documents.

Weebly is a website builder unlike anything you have ever experienced. This drag & drop website builder makes it simple to create a powerful, professional website without any technical skills required. Content elements (like text, photos, maps, and videos) are added to your website by simply dragging & dropping them into place. Text is edited just like in a word processor. Building your website is done in real time, right from within your web browser. There's absolutely nothing to install and no upgrades to worry about.

WikiSpaces For Educators is a great place for your students to publish and share their work.  Join the WikiSpaces K-12 Plan. These wikis are free and ad-free, and you can make them private for extra security for your students. K-12 wikis also come with a User Creator tool that lets you open student accounts in bulk — without student email addresses.

Google Sites is a structured wiki- and web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps Productivity suite. If your students already have a Google account, it makes the process a lot easier from already having multimedia ready to use, and they are already used to the format of Google Apps.

YouTube Education takes YouTube to the next level by screening videos that are only for education.  After creating an account, you can upload and publish your own videos in addition to just browsing for videos that have already been uploaded.  YouTube does a great job ensuring that all the videos are appropriate and educational for all types of learners. 

Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website. Picasa is owned by Google, which makes it very easy to sync, publish, and share your pictures with other Google Apps.  I really like the collage feature where you can create a collage from your own pictures. 

Poderator is a simple, free way to publish your podcasts.  Your students can now, easily upload their digital media files (either audio or video) to a site that hosts them for free. 

MyEbooks is a free app that allows you to create, store, publish, and share your own ebooks. The ebooks are also interactive by allowing you to grab the corner of each page and physically turn it backward or forward to navigate throughout the ebook.

To view my favorite ways for students to create projects to put in their e-Portfolio, visit my blog post: 14 Free Online Apps to Get Your Students Creating!