Skeptic House, 2nd Gen

How can you tell your story in living color, stories, projects and pictures?

Why, use an ePortfolio of course! You can use portfolio projects to tell your story about your academic (and professional) competence in the areas listed below.

Your basic digital identity: who you are, expressed

• in elevator speech style
• as a one sentence tagline
• through an image (logo)

You will have additional projects assigned over the year.

You will also be able to choose other projects to feature your abilities and skills as:

• a writer (writing competence)
• a visual story-teller (how you use images to create a visual narrative)
• an interpreter of quantitative data (how you visualize and interpret data)
• a thoughtful person, reflecting insightfully and critically on your learning

Best ePortfolio design practices

There are three basic guidelines for best practices in ePortfolio design. Each post should include:

1. a relevant graphic (photograph, graphic, scrawl — you get the picture)
2. a very short summary (aim for a paragraph or less) to entice the reader to go deeper
3. a well-written explanatory narrative about the project (you can use the "learn more" feature)

What if my audience is just me and my classmates for now?

The question of visibility — what should be private, what should be public — is one you'll be exploring later. For now, know that there is always a way to control access.

For example — if you want to know how to manage your privacy settings in Wordpress — take a look at the following help page on WordPress Site Privacy.

Step #1 - Register for the pilot

Fill out the ePortfolio pilot registration form.

Step #2 - Log in to your ePortfolio Account

https://eportfolio.sou.edu/username/wp-admin/

Step #3 - Create your Wordpress site and set to Illustratr theme.

• When you log in to your account, your website will show up with a default theme.
• Set up the Illustratr Theme (yes, it is misspelled) and change your site name

The theme determines the organization and look and feel of your ePortfolio. Everyone will start out using the Illustratr theme.

1. Look along the left side of your dashboard (in the long gray column) until you see Appearance.
2. Click on Appearance, and choose Themes.
3. Find the Illustratr theme.
4. A thumbnail will show up labelled Illustratr. When you hover over the thumbnail, you will see a button labeled Activate. Click on the button.
5. On the next screen, click on Customize Your Site.
6. Of course, you don't want your site title (what will show at the top of your site) to be lastnameportfolio. Change it by choosing Site Name, Tagline and Logo from the column on the left, and type the title you want to appear at the top of your ePortfolio.
7. Don't worry — you can change these at any time — see Configure Settings.
8. Click on Save and Publish.

ePortfolio Tutorials

Step 4: Set up your ePortfolio project pages, create a menu and a blog page.

(Note: these videos were set up for EMDA299. Replace this with your class name).

Different post formats may also provide some alternative blog formatting needs (see also Enhance Your Website with Post Formats).

Tips on the Use of Images

Twice as many people will look at your posts and pages on your ePortfolio if each has an image. Make sure that the graphics and images you use are labeled for noncommercial use, with usage rights "Free to use, share or modify."

Here's how to find a rich source of images:

• Click on "Images" at the top of your Google page.
• At the bottom, on the right, click on "Settings" and choose "Advanced Search."
• Specify a term or terms that you are interested in (say, Flowers) by filling out "Find images with."
• Select image size, aspect ratio, color, type.
• Under "Usage Rights," choose "Free to use, share or modify."
• From this filtered group, you can choose images by size, color, type.
• Right-click on each image, and choose "Save Image As" — to save the images (to your desktop or folder).
• For a video and more on images, see How to search for copyright-free images.

A great resource on managing images is Image Positioning, Spacing and Alignment in WordPress: Common Problems and Fixes.

One of the challenges of the use of images in WordPress is to manage their size. Take a look at this resource for help: Resizing Photos.

Changing the order of projects on your ePortfolio home page

WordPress organizes everything chronologically. The last thing published is the first thing listed. To change the order of featured images on your ePortfolio home page (or the order of blog posts), manually change the publishing date: On the editing screen for the project page, edit the publish date and time, remembering to click on "Update" when you are done. Control the order of postings or project pages on your home page by setting the dates in reverse order — the project page or blog post you want to show up first has the later publish date.

Other helpful information

• How to create a custom header (an image at the top of your ePortfolio)
• Enhance your site with widgets (free built-in tools you can use. These are determined by the theme that you are using.)
• Create content (posts, images, video, audio)
• Just about everything else WordPress

One thing to remember is that you are using SOU WordPress, and some of the options that are available from WordPress.com may not be available, some that WordPress.com doesn't have might be available, and some of the screens may look slightly different from the WordPress.com documentation. Right now, you are limited to the Illustratr theme; we're looking at others we might install on our SOU server. If you see other themes that you would like us to explore, let us know at disteducation@sou.edu.

Another tip — if you do a Google search to get more information about a WordPress feature, make sure you look at WordPress.com support information only. If you get on a WordPress.org support page, you are looking at information for people who run WordPress servers, and we've got IT people to do that for us.

Finally — yes, you now know how to create a gorgeous website on our SOU WordPress server. Remember that you shouldn't use this resource for your consulting business or any other non-school purpose. If you have non-school needs, get a WordPress.com account. They are, after all, free.