PDA – Exploring previous portfolios
Designing Your Own Portfolio
What Can You Learn by Looking at Other Teachers’ Portfolios
The majority of credit for CEP 807 goes to Dr. Patrick Dickson who has developed the course over the past 10 years. Sean and Cherice have made adaptations to the assignments to fit with our summer cohort “flow.” We sincerely thank him for the use of these materials and hope you enjoy the capstone experience.
Purpose. Each of you will develop a capstone portfolio in this course and share your capstone portfolios with the masters program. The quality and variety of forms of the capstone portfolio continue to evolve, so you might view your capstone portfolio as a bridge from the past to the future. You can learn from previous capstone portfolios and the new cohort’s capstone portfolios will be informed by your examples.
I want to encourage you to create a portfolio that serves your purposes and expresses what you wish it to express. My most fundamental aspiration is that the work you do in this course is “authentic” and “useful” and leads to further growth and development after the course ends.
As you consider how to design your own capstone portfolio, you might think of this more broadly as creating your “web presence”–how you want to present yourself to a wider audience on the Web. Keep in mind that, in my opinion, the Web is here to stay and if you learn to use it for your personal and professional purposes, you will be better prepared to teach the students you teach how to use it for such purposes.
The best way I know of to get your creative thinking going is to invite you to explore some of the portfolios developed by teachers in the master’s program in educational technology in past years.
But with this introduction, have fun exploring the capstone portfolios of past capstone seminars. You may want to keep notes of the features you like.
Specific Assignment. This assignment is designed to have you visit some portfolios created by others and reflect upon what features you might or might not wish to include as you craft your own web presence. Don’t be surprised if some of the links no longer work. Anyone can remove or change their portfolios any time.
1. Spend at least a half an hour or more exploring capstone portfolios from past years.
http://web.me.com/bindu61/Bindu/Bindu.html
http://www.brunnerdoug.com/portfolio/Me.html
http://sites.google.com/site/marissasnodgress/home
http://hypatia.edublogs.org/about/
http://web.me.com/codsi/Renee_Codsi/Home.html
http://web.me.com/ebaland/Dusty_Rucksack/Dusty_Rucksack/Dusty_Rucksack.html
http://sites.google.com/site/williamthoneprofessional/
http://www.lanitafoley.com/blog/
http://sites.google.com/site/donnalkleinmsu/
https://www.msu.edu/~kytevict/Portfolio/Welcome.html
http://www.jenlovesteaching.com/
http://web.me.com/mhughes5/Hughes_09-10/Professional_Life.html
https://www.msu.edu/~mart1075/aboutme.htm
http://ericjacklich.squarespace.com/
https://www.msu.edu/~pdickson/cep807/asggallery08U.htm
2. Identify one capstone portfolio from these galleries that you see as a good model for the one you wish to create. Write down name and year and a few thoughts on what you liked for your own design process. In addition, you might wish to identify specific pages or examples from other portfolios that you would like to emulate.
3. Share your ideas! – leave a comment at the bottom of this post with some of your thoughts on what you have learned by viewing past PDA’s and/or any inspiring items you may have discovered while browsing (this can be content, design, or technology related) you don’t need to worry about being “too” specific…just looking for your thoughts.
Tags: learning from others, patrick dickson, PDA, portfolio, teachers
I really liked the PDA’s with a lot of visuals that helped to tell the story. I plan to start choosing images for mine soon…
As I looked over many of the examples, I liked those that had a clear and simply welcome page that had easy to find and navigate links. I also liked having multimedia components such as the embedded videos ans such. I didn’t care for lengthy personal information and unprofessional imagery.
Being a Math teacher makes it very normal for me to notice more websites with shapes especially those with funky colors. That was what first attracted me to Bindu Bammi’s Website that is an MAET09 graduate.
I was impressed by the way how she shifts from a page to another using very creative icons and artistic themes.
A great page is the “resources” page where she scattered the resources in a creative way blended with the presence of the paint brush that adds life to the website and is present on most of the pages.
This page made me reflect and almost know what exactly I should be focusing on while creating my PDA. I will be focusing on my teaching philosophy, my reflection, my course work, some achievements, my professional background, my personal social projects, student work, my web 2.0 projects, Digital artifacts, and finally my trips around the world.
But all has to be in harmony with great unique format that will make it easier for the reader to peruse surfing my website.
One of the ideas that I will definitely steal is having a contact me page and a cover or intro into the site. I have noticed that different platforms have been used to create the portfolios. I haven’t chosen mine yet, but I like the ones created using a website builder the most. My favorite portfolio was created using WordPress and it is both visually appealing, organized, rich in content and contained a lot of personal reflections.
Thanks for sharing these examples. They will surely get me started.
Maybe it my engineer background what makes me like simple and practical sites with easy navigation links. As a new teacher i won’t have much to say if i have experience page but i will defiantly have a resources page .
Thank you for sharing these examples they really put me on the road.
I really like Renae’s. The layout and the look of it are very appealing, it makes me want to explore her site more to check it out…and I did! The clean look and the pictures were interesting to me and pulled me into her site. I actually liked how she used black as the background…it made her words and photos pop and seem very bright.
I liked Leyna’s PDA. I looked through most of them because I know most of these people. Leyna’s is a very clean PDA in the sense that it is appealing but also does not overwhelm me. I looked at Bindu’s and it was too busy for me. I looked at another one that bored me but I do not want to put their name. I believe I will be borrowing frommore than one of these.
The PDA’s that I researched looked very well done. I am looking forward to planning out the design of my PDA. This will certainly be a challenge since a Web Site can get so scattered (for me at least).
Unlike a storyboard which to me is easy and linear, Web Site design is for the RAM Lovers and Giga Squatters of the world. I can just imagine what Raward is thinking right now. I bet it is the scene from Flashdance. He is wishing that he was a Welder that at night dances. He is a Maniac, because no one has ever seen one dance like him before. That or he just can’t feel the rhythm of beat.
Anyway, I am looking forward to designing and creating my PDA. Hopefully it will have a lot of examples and cool stuff that will not bore to many people.
cheers
I enjoyed looking at Bindu’s PDA. The visual impact grabbed my attention.
The colorful, more visual PDAs appeal to me, but I prefer the simpler layouts that focus on the content. Although the multimedia does add to some of them, others seem to use it gratuitously.
I’d go for Lenya’s PDA, I like the clean lines and the way she formats the information. I find some of the more visual elements in others a little distracting.
I quite enjoyed the Eric Jacklich web portfolio except that I was unhappy to find he had posted screenshots of his work instead of including his work or links to it. I wanted to see his work and read his reflections on his projects because I found his portfolio layout attractive.
I also looked through the websites, and honestly I have to say that I just get tired of looking at static website. I like the idea of Ahead because it will add some dynamism to the whole project. Because I am a conceptual thinking I like seeing the big picture before getting into the nitty gritty.
No more website for me!
I liked looking at the websites, but after a bunch, many of them blended together. Aesthetically, I liked Leyna’s. I need to work more on developing my own site, using an appropriate template that has already been created.
I think that Bindu, Doug and Leyna’s were my favorite. The images and layers within Doug’s were were very visually appealing. It had a consistent theme throughout and was focused on education. Bindu’s was very visually appealing and it was very far from a “canned” format. Leyna’s had a lot of content, but some of it was redundant. The layout was very professional looking though.
I liked doug and marissa’s website, both contain interesting layers and powerful media. I looked at most of them and they were either miss leading in the way they divided their index webpage, or dull and boring and this gave me some important idea to pay attention to while making my PDA
I looked through each PDA and found that I liked the most organized portfolios and the ones that were easy to navigate. I feel like for the audience that I am trying to capture it would be best to keep my PDA clean and simple. I chose 4 PDA’s I liked the most: Doug, Lanita, Jen, and Eric. On Doug’s portfolio I liked how everything was easy to navigate at the top of the page and that you could refer back to any heading at any time. Lanita set hers up like a blog which I really liked so then people could make comments right onto her work and could still easily navigate each section of her portfolio. On Jen’s I liked the simplicity of her website. Each page seemed to have the “right” amount of information. Finally, Eric’s looked very artistic which I loved, but I would be worried that I would not be able to recreate that idea and make it work out without it being too complicated.
I want my PDA to be easy to navigate through. I like Bindu’s, and Leyna’s PDA examples.
There is a lot of variety and that helps me to feel a little less stressed about it. The sites I looked at were quite different in their approach thought the information was similar. I am a little concerned about being able to access some of the material that I have done with my class but think I wil be able to work it all out in the end.
I have now changed my mind. I don’t know if Ahead is such a great idea because if I want ot use this in the future I want to make sure that the viewer can access the information quickly. They might not be interested and may not have the time to learn how to browse through material on a new platform. I am now going to be using snappages! So yes, I lied before!