Do you use digital portfolios? Do you know what they are?
Let’s dig into them together with our bulb Digital Portfolio Review!
Just FYI – I think digital portfolios are a wonderful tool for homeschoolers. Here’s why:
- With a portfolio (think of it as a digital scrapbook), you can document your kids’ education. This can help you prove you’re doing a good job homeschooling!
- Your kids can use portfolios to document and enhance their education as well. They can make cool presentations that show off their skills and aptitude and they can use them for assignments/presentations.
My kids absolutely LOVE their portfolios. They peruse and add to their portfolios on a regular basis. Plus, we’ve found that making the portfolio is an educational experience in and of itself. And portfolios are especially great for high school students. Just imagine two college applications, one with a visually stunning digital portfolio showcasing the student’s interests and achievements and one without. Or similarly, two kids applying for the same job. You get the idea – and you know which one is going to make the better impression. 🙂
Now, onto the bulb Digital Portfolio Review!
With bulb you can build BEAUTIFUL (and I do mean BEAUTIFUL), web based digital portfolios – and it’s so EASY! Really – it is SO easy!
FYI – here is a 1 minute video overview of bulb.
And here are some examples of how bulb can been used:
bulb offers lots of great functions/features (so you too, can make amazing portfolios). These functions include:
- Private Groups: For co-ops – you can create unlimited classrooms or groups, in which your students can collaborate and publish privately.
- Google Drive Integration: You can integrate your bulb and Google accounts to pull documents and other assets from your Google Drive to add to your bulb portfolio.
- Single-Field Page Editing Design: bulb’s simple single-field editing allows you to click, type and enter to build out pages, combining multimedia assets: composition, image, video, file attachments and embedded content. bulb offers tools to resize, realign and crop videos and images as well. Users can embed content from over 300 different websites, including Google forms, Prezi, Twitter, and more. Users can also attach a Powerpoint, PDF, Word, or Excel file, and previews are generated directly on the bulb page. Really, this is such an simple process – I thoroughly enjoyed it.
- Presentation Mode: This is one of my favorite features – you can present a single page or collection in your portfolio directly from bulb. Presentation mode automatically translates each scrolling page into single, presentation-friendly slides. This is super for kids/presentations – and super for parent/teachers too.
- Asset Library: You can upload, organize and edit content directly in one centralized library and easily add any asset to multiple pages. All of the content you’ve uploaded to your existing pages is visible here, and can be organized into folders.
- Mobile Page Editing: You can create – using all the same tools you use on your computer – on tablets and phones. My kids use this feature a lot.
All of these features are truly wonderful and they enhance one’s creativity. Plus, they enhance one’s organizational skills! My kids have had to organize their pages and collections and they’ve actually discovered that the simple task of organization makes complex subjects a little easier to understand. That’s huge! Thank you bulb!
Want to see some more examples of bulb portfolios?
What does our family like about bulb? Can I just say EVERYTHING and leave it at that? No, you want a little more detail?
- The website offers LOTS of help getting started. I appreciate this, because I usually don’t enjoy learning and starting a new program.
- There is a free 30 day trial and I’m a fan of one month trials. A month is long enough to truly try out a product and know if you like it and want to continue with it. I don’t even sign up for week-long trials. I’m glad bulb offers an entire month.
- When we signed up for our free trial and we received this e-mail:
great customer service
- The $30/year cost per user is affordable. And when you think about it, since bulb provides a creative outlet; makes learning fun; helps your kids organize, and gives you educational documentation – $30 per year per user is an absolute steal!
And the site offers discounted bulk pricing for more than 25 accounts (starting at $7.96 per user per year). Think homeschool co-ops.
- The main, most important, wonderful thing about bulb – it’s REALLY easy to make a polished page. So much easier than other programs/sites I’ve used. For a video showing how easy it is, click here, and scroll down to the sea turtle video.
- I love how visually appealing the portfolios are and how easy it is to add photos, videos and more.
- My kids ENJOY making their portfolios and making the portfolio is educational, in and of itself.
- And what I always knew and it shows, my kids are very creative!
- I discovered that I am too, because of course I’m making portfolios for each of my children.
- And remember, how I said they were becoming more organized, what a great benefit!
- The end (or more accurately – ongoing) portfolio is SO impressive. Personally, I love the fact that you can develop a really cool resume on this site! https://www.bulbapp.com/u/professional-resume~1
- I love the presentations my kids are making – bulb is enhancing our homeschooling experience.
- Bulb offers different publishing options and can be private or public or in between. Think group shares.
- As mentioned, the customer service is great.
- Visually, I love the site.
- Contextually, I love the site with humor throughout.
In conclusion, we are really impressed!
Thank you for spending your time with our bulb Digital Portfolio Review brought to you by How to Homeschool!
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- bulb Digital Portfolio Review
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