Introduction

Depending on the assessment's requirements you may specify that students use UCL Reflect or MyPortfolio for creating an outward facing assessment such as a blog post or website, or an e-portfolio. UCL Reflect is UCL's educational blogging service. MyPortfolio is UCL's instance of Mahara, an e-portfolio tool. The Digital Education blog post Creating digital portfolios discusses the differences between UCL Reflect and MyPortfolio for e-portfolio creation.

By default all students at UCL have a MyPortfolio account, you will however have to create groups and arrange with Digital Education to restrict editing for group members at the assessment deadline. This can only be done by Digital Education.

UCL Reflect is a by request service, for an assessment you will need to request a class blog. Digital Education will create the class blog and any associated individual or group student blogs attached to the main class blog. As part of the settings for a class blog you are able to restrict editing to the blogs yourself at the assessment deadline. See the sections on UCL Reflect below for more information about class blogs and how to request one.

UCL Reflect

UCL Reflect is a WordPress service hosted by CampusPress, because of this it doesn't function in quite the same way as regular WordPress. It can be used as a blogging platform, but also to create websites including e-portfolios. For ideas on how UCL Reflect can be used see the Digital Education blog post Reflect's Hall of Mirrors.

There is a particular process for requesting a class blog, this is outlined in the Reflect Blogging Resource Centre article Requesting a Class blog with student contributors or affiliated student blogs.

This outlines in more detail the three scenarios for using the class blog feature:

1. Students to one overall class blog / web site.
2. Students contribute to a group blog / web site.
3. Students contribute to their own blog / web site.

Using UCL Reflect

The following short videos explain more about Reflect, managing class blogs and show you how to access and edit / contribute to a UCL Reflect site. All the videos have captions and a transcript.

• UCL Reflect: Introduction
  • Introduction Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Class Blogs
  • Class Blogs Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Posts and Pages
  
  • Posts and Pages Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Menus
  • Menus Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Appearance (Themes and Widgets)
  • Appearance Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Plugins
  • Plugins Transcript

A series of how-to guides are available in the Reflect Resource Centre.

To find out how to do more, in depth guidance and self-paced online courses are available:

• EduBlogs User Guides

• LinkedIn Learning (Login with your UCL account so you can see everything!) And visit this collection of online WordPress (a.k.a. Reflect) training courses.

MyPortfolio