Portfolio

I had the great honor of being selected as a 2017 National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow. National Geographic sent me, courtesy of Lindblad Expeditions, to Svalbard, Greenland and Iceland to experience the Arctic and bring that experience back to my teaching and community.

One of the outcomes of this Fellowship is I have produced a lot of different kinds of content that relates to the expedition across multiple platforms. This portfolio is an attempt to archive and curate that content through one access point.

I created this portfolio for a variety of reasons; to have an artifact of my expedition, so evaluators and funders could easily review the outputs for program outcomes and impacts, that colleagues might have a model to build upon to organize and share their own experiences. But most of all, I created this portfolio to find the story and even the poetry of this Expedition.

What story will I find when I juxtapose a map with Facebook posts, a free flow journal with data? I don't know yet. It won't be linear with a narrative arc but there will be setting, characters, and perhaps even a little bit of plot.

This is my first attempt at such a resource. These are a few of my lessons learned:

  • Creating this archive was a big task. It took more time than I thought it would.
  • What to leave out requires just as much thought as what to leave in. I don't know that I got that right. Do I include links to the artifacts of my fellow Fellows? What about a list of GTF resources? I have no idea what I might need in the future.
  • Check permission settings when sharing your own work. When it doubt, make it viewable on the web.

Despite these challenges I found a lot of value in creating this portfolio. Retrospectives are always useful. I do not think think this will will be my last archive. The new Google sites are useful for this work because they are easy to set up, edit, and add content to even if it is from outside the Google environment. The lack of design choices (colors, fonts, layouts) is far outshadowed by how quickly you can deploy the site. As long as the new Google sites exist in their current form and functionality I will use them.