Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Making it All Yours

When building a digital portfolio what could be more  more important than building a your own website with all the tools and wonderful professional accounts that you have to offer? What things could you include? Well aside all of the things we have previously talked about there is also about.me for starters that can be a smaller and to the point version of your online resume. It allows a picture with a brief description and then allows you to customize it and attach buttons to all your social media accounts AND of course your real website. Jaqcueline Thomas explains how to perfect this in her definitive guide to about me pages for anyone who might be curious or struggling with what to include and perhaps even what to definitely leave out.
Paper.li is another great one to include, it creates a daily newspaper including article updates with all the subjects you choose to affiliate yourself with and updates automatically at the pace you please with a very nicely laid out aesthetic design. This will also link to your other accounts such as your twitter, and affiliate your accounts like twitter into your paper if you please.
IFTT or (if then than that) is a great tool that will integrate your selected accounts as well. It allows you to create "recipes" between different accounts that you select and will automatically post things for you when you use one account and update itself on another if you choose. This is good for if you
have a lot of different accounts and do not necessarily have the time to update each of them individually. For example, I made my own recipe where anytime I have a new paper from Paper.li, twitter will automatically report a tweet of it for my followers to see.
Now, when all is said and done, we're going to need a way to build this website that ties it all together. There are several great website-building tools that allow us to make this something amazing. This post  teaches you all about weebly's deal and probably even more helpfully a video that step by step teaches you how to maximize the use of the builder and some cooler things you can do with it that your average new user may not realize (although chances are we probably covered it in #gen2243!)
 
If Weebly might not fit the design aesthetic that you are looking for with your website, then you might want to check out Wix which focuses highly on the look of the site. It starts out by helping you choose your design by career of choice to present you with corresponding layouts which is super cool and helpful. With all that you can do it can be hard to choose the right customization without getting overwhelmed. You can read here for some do's and don'ts for how to keep your website looking extraordinary but sharp and most of all, not overwhelming itself!

Chapter 4 of Untangling the Web discusses social media that can be integrated into the classroom. One of these sites is called TodaysMeet that allows educators to maintain a digital classroom where students and teachers can have online discussion in a private or public setting.
Another similar one is Edmodo, which is probably a bit more well-known. This is similar except even parents can be added into the mix of discussion. It gives way for parents to check on their kids schoolwork and also for teachers to connect with other teachers in the global community. Lastly we can't forget the integration of Skype which takes it a step further as it becomes a video interaction. Which leaves me to leave you with this beautiful video that my professor showed us a few classes back, but I have to share it and all its emotions. If you want to see skype utilized to its fullest in a class room be sure to check this one out. Warning: you may need a tissue.
  


1 comment:

  1. I really enjoyed watching the video that was posted onto your blog. It is well designed and added a unique twist to get others to view your postings. I agree with the paper.li website because it is a great tool to use to view and post specific articles and news letters about any field that you are interested in.

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