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Showcase accounts: A best practice for sharing student work

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Kylie
by Esri Regular Contributor
Esri Regular Contributor
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Your students have done amazing work in ArcGIS Online that you’d like to share with the community or preserve even after the student has graduated. But they are minors, so their privacy needs to be protected and they shouldn’t be allowed to share publicly in your ArcGIS Organization. And when they graduate, you want to remove their ArcGIS Online account but not lose their work. So how can you share the work, while at the same time protecting their privacy and managing your organization accounts? A showcase account!

What is a showcase account? It is an account you make in your organization just like you do accounts for your teachers and students, but you use it solely to share items. Once a piece of content is complete and deemed worthy of sharing to a public audience, it is moved into the showcase account and shared from there.

What you’ll do:

  1. Make a special account
  2. Move stellar completed student work to that account
  3. Share the work publicly

And now for the details to each step:

 

1. Make a special account

Create an account directly in ArcGIS Online by adding a member without sending an invitation

Recommendations:

First nameShowcase
Last name

Last name District or school name or abbreviation

Ex: Orange Tree Unified School District would use OTUSD

Email addressThe email address used by your ArcGIS organization admins
Username

Use the format “showcase.shortname” where shortname is the short name for your ArcGIS organization

Ex: Orange Tree Unified School District (https://otusd.maps.arcgis.com) would use showcase.otusd

User type

Creator

If it is not available, Professional Plus

RolePublisher
Temporary passwordProvide a password that meets requirements; it will be changed the first time the account is logged in to

 

Note: Make sure to fill out the profile. Since you use the account to share publicly, it displays when readers want to learn more about who created the content.

2. Move stellar, completed student work to that account

In ArcGIS Online, change the work to be owned by the showcase account

Keep in mind that a piece of work might reference other items, and all will need to be moved and shared publicly. For example, a StoryMap might reference a layer, a map, and a dashboard. You’d need to move and share all 4 items.

Note: Moving the content to this org also removes student access to edit or delete it, avoiding changes to publicly shared work. Once the student who created it graduates, their account can be deleted and items in the showcase account won’t be affected.

3. Share the work publicly

An adult shares the content publicly. This ensures that it is appropriate for sharing publicly and doesn't expose private student data. There are a couple of ways they can do the sharing:

Make sure to share all the items that make up the piece of work, just like in the previous step you needed to move all of them.

Wrap-up

Think of your ArcGIS organization as a bakery. Cooks (students) are working on treats (assignments). There are some creations that just shine, and that we can’t wait to serve. These are the dishes we’ll showcase.

AdobeStock_268859698.jpeg

We sell them under our bakery name, credit is not given to each individual baker for their particular creations. Similarly in our showcase account, we present all the content under a unified name. When it comes to students, this is key in protecting their privacy.

In the kitchen, other treats burned, some flopped, and some components from the star dishes are left over. While lessons were learned through them, we won’t serve them. Likewise in your ArcGIS showcase, curate what should be shared and have a quality standard that must be met.

Now you have a showcase full of polished, amazing, drool-inducing delicacies. Or, to put it back into ArcGIS organization terms, you have a collection of amazing maps, StoryMaps, layers and other items, all ready for others to consume.

About the Author
Our kids need GIS in their problem-solving toolboxes. I'm working to get digital maps into each K-12 classroom and the hands of each child. A long-time Esri employee, I've previously worked on Esri's mobile apps, focused on documentation and best practices. Out of the office I'm a runner often found on the trails or chasing my children.