Customizing ePortfolio Assignment II

Due: May 30 (11:59PM)

Time on Task: 2-5 Hours

In week one, our focus was on “claiming” our ePortfolio space by adjusting some basic starter settings, making a blog post to learn to make a POST, and making some pages to practice the difference between a post and a PAGE. This week, we start to CUSTOMIZE!

The great thing here is that I’m noticing that many of us have already done SOME of what’s required here!

Your Task

  1. Go to your first Daily Create (week 1) to Edit it. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page and find the Discussion option. Look to make sure you’ve checked “Allow comments” so we can comment on the DC.  1 minute
  2. Choose a “Theme” for your ePortfolio through “Appearance>Themes” in your Dashboard. You MUST move into your theme, so choose with care. For example, UNE Portfolios uses a modification of “Catch Responsive,” and that theme calls for featured content, specific images, and more. Choosing a theme is the starting point for the visual presentation of yourself in ePortfolio. (The good news is that you can change themes pretty easily.) 30-60 minutes
  3. Customize your theme in the following ways: 60-120 minutes
    1. Most of us adjusted the Site Identity in week 1; do it now if you didn’t do it then.
    2. Skip to Header Image. Get yourself a good one. This is your ePortfolio, so take care in your selection.
      • Own the whole thing by being the photographer for your ePortfolio’s header image. (It’s easy. Use your smart phone, take a nice photo, email it to yourself, save it to your computer, and then upload it to your ePortfolio.)
      • If you choose an image from the Internet, get one that’s not copyrighted and that doesn’t have a watermark. (You’ll also need to give source/photo credit somewhere in your ePortfolio, perhaps at the bottom of your About Me page.)
      • The original image must be at least as large as header size recommended for your chosen theme, as indicated in Appearance>Customize>Header Image. If you try to resize UP, you’ll get a crappy image. It’s best to resize DOWN and crop as needed.
      • Note: You are limited to a 2MB file size for your header image, so you may need to do some quality adjustments to get your image under that limit. An iPhone can do that, as can GIMP or Photoshop. (See my Digital Creation Toolbox for help.)
    3. Play around with the Colors options to get a sense of what changes look like for you.
      • Get yourself a color picker tool to grab precise colors from your header image to build a coherent palette for your ePortfolio: Just Color Picker; Chrome Browser Extension Color Picker/Eyedropper.
      • Focus on selecting what are called hexadecimal (hex) values, codes that tells the web browser what color to use. (They look like this: #007acc.) You can add them right into the little text box in Appearance>Customize>Colors. I use a color picker to pick and copy a color, then I paste it the hex value right into WordPress. (I keep one right on my computer!)
      • Be sure to try out the Background, Link, Main Text, and Secondary Text color options.
      • After playing around for maybe 20 minutes, make decisions that work for you – for now. It’s YOUR WEBSITE, so you can always change things.
    4. Armed with a Header Image and good Colors, head back to Site Identity and make a “Site Icon.”
  4. Your ePortfolio is a showcase for your education that also positions you professionally. I will not define what, specifically, shows your achievement as a student, but make choices within the following framework: 30-90 minutes
    • Choose at least three other courses to feature in your ePortfolio and make a page for each course. Find the official course descriptions online and quote them in these new pages. Additionally, draft your own brief description of each course and the key things you learned in each course. If you’ve used ePortfolio as part of a class before this term, add three NEW COURSES. Keep building!
    • Begin to identify the work that best shows evidence of your learning/achievement in those selected courses. Consider how you want to present or package that evidence in your ePortfolio. (You’ll need to have that in the ePortfolio by the end of the term; I’ll prompt you weekly.)
    • You should now have at least 8 pages in your ePortfolio: About Me, DS106, Daily Create #tdc????, WRT 304, Resume, Course 1 (named), Course 2 (relevant custom name), Course 3 (yes, custom).
  5. Add PAGES for your two Daily Creates for week 2 and for the “What’s the Meme” and “Selfie with Your Pet” DS106 assignments. (I know things are starting to feel out of control! In week 3, we’ll make a custom menu to organize all these pages.) Some of us are already working with custom menus. If so, great! If not, relax about it. We’ll get there.
  6. Control Comments: 5 minutes
    1. In Settings>Discussion for the first customizing ePortfolio assignment, we checked the second box (“comment author must have a previously approved comment”) under “Before a Comment Appears.” This setting adds protection from spam by making sure that nobody without a comment previously approved BY YOU shows up on your site.
    2. This week, consider whether you’d like to check the second box in the “Before a Comment Appears” section of Settings>Discussion. If you check the second box, people’s comments show only in your dashboard UNTIL/UNLESS you approve them. This enables you to manually control the visibility of all comments. I won’t make this decision for you, but if you check the box it will mean that comments I (or others) make on posts/page will be for your eyes only UNLESS you want them public.