Well, I am officially halfway through another 2 courses in my master's program. Time is definitely flying by, but I am learning and changing the way I think, and approach things more than I could have possibly imagined in such a short period of time. In the first 8-week courses I created a basic ePortfolio with some simple pages and not a lot of thought if we are being completely honest. Now that I have had time to focus on tweaking and making my ePortfolio mine things are changing, and I like what I see.
My main struggle was trying to figure out how to upload my assignments and keep the correct formatting. I added buttons to my site for my assignments and thought things were great. In reality every time someone clicked the buttons it made them download my assignments and work before it would let them view it. Personally, I know that I do not want other people's work downloaded on my computer just taking up space and I can’t be the only one who feels this way. So of course that was not going to work for me, and I had to continue my search on how to fix this issue and get it to where it did what I wanted it to do. There has been a lot of trial and error with my documents to say the least. Next, I moved on to where I was copying and pasting my assignments on my pages but for some reason it would not let me indent or keep my formatting. This was yet another huge issue for me and has taken up a lot of time. Still, not fixed!
Along with other things I was struggling with once I paid for a few add-ons with my site more options began to open up for me. Voila, I finally figured it out! I now have options where I can attach forms and documents, and nothing has to be downloaded. My format and reference links work like they should, and it feels like I am making progress. I can now refer someone to my Learning Manifesto, Literature Review, and other work when needed.
While I was paying for add-ons, I purchased my domain as well so now when I send a link to my ePortfolio it doesn’t have random numbers and letters it says https://www.roserayner.com/. I feel this looks more professional, and I will be able to take it with me after completing my master's degree.
Now that I have a chance to play around with more options, I was able to add a comment section to my Blog Page that is continuously growing. This will be great so that anyone who views my blogs can leave me comments and suggestions they might have from things I have posted. I love getting feedback and turning it into feedforward. We can learn and grow from everything including negative comments.
I had another setback when I was trying to figure out how to add a search bar to my site. Even though I am only about 12 weeks into the program I already have a good amount of work posted on my ePortfolio, and I know that it is going to continue to grow. This will make it impossible to go back and find something that was posted a while back, which means my site needs a search bar. Time is precious, and most of us don't have a lot of it to waste searching and searching for something. Technology has ways to make things more convenient and quicker, we just need to find out how to use it correctly. This was not an option off to the side like pictures, colors, fonts, and layouts I could use. I ended up finding what I needed in my settings tab, I am still not sure why it was placed here, but I found it!
Along with finding my search tab there are also site statistics. I can see how many have viewed which pages on my site, where they are searching from, and if they used a link to my site or if it was a google search. I thought this was pretty neat, and I have had people from New Zealand view my ePortfolio.
I have changed the font and size of my text on my about me page to make it more user friendly and added a picture of my husband and I to make it more personable. I am still debating on the font color; I like how the white looks with the black background but also like the purple. So, I am still deciding what I would like to do with this part of the site. I can always go back and change it as I continue to move through the program. I also added a CSLE & COVA page as my homepage because I feel like it gives the visitors a little information about why I have created my ePortfolio and a little about what that means. This is still a work in progress, and I am not sure how this page will end.
While creating the CSLE & COVA page I have been able to play around with AI some. I originally wrote something up for that page and then let AI rewrite it. It sounded better, but I still had to change it up some to make it more personable and fit what I want to create. I am going to continue to play around with the AI tools since this is the first time I have been introduced to it. I want to try and figure out how to use AI to create images next. I have been using stock images for pages and free pictures from google, so this will be interesting to see what I can change as I continue my journey.
