Electronic Teaching Portfolios–Part 4
See the other parts of this series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Today’s part to the Building an Electronic Portfolio Series focuses on how you should distribute your E-Portfolio. You will need to take many things into account including available equipment, financial concerns, and personal privacy. Should you put your portfolio online and just send out a link to it when needed, or are burning CDs a better option for you? Let’s talk about both and then you can decide what meets your needs and the needs of your audience. We’ll discuss these options after the jump.
Technorati Tags: Education, teacher portfolios, electronic teacher portfolios, online teacher portfolios
It’s time to consider your options on what type of medium to distribute your electronic portfolio. We’re going to talk about the three most important considerations, in my opinion, when trying to figure out what to do: available equipment, financial concerns, and personal privacy. All three are necessary to think about, and each impacts the others. It’s important to think of what you value most and go in that direction.
First, you need to think about what equipment you have available to you as you create your portfolio. For instance, if you want to put your portfolio online, it may be necessary to have a fast internet connection. Some of your files and artifacts will be quite large and trying to upload them with a dial-up modem could take a very long time. However, in order to put the portfolio on CD, you need to have a computer that is capable of burning CDs. You may also need a program capable of printing CD labels for a more professional look, as well.
Perhaps something that will make your decision for you is the financial commitment you will have to make. Putting your portfolio online will require having a website. While there are free sites out there, it is much more professional to purchase a domain name and pay for hosting of your site. This could cost you $75 a year for the minimum packages on reliable sites, or even more. Burning CDs require the purchase of the CDs and labels, as well as the cost of printer ink for those labels and CD sleeves or cases to store them in. You may also want to consider that sending out CDs along with your resume will cost extra postage. Also, while it will cost nothing extra to update a portfolio on the internet, you will need to burn new CDs every time you change or add to your electronic portfolio on CD, costing you even more money.
The final consideration to make is how much you value your privacy. If your portfolio is on the internet, anyone who happens by it will be able to see your personal information, which could include your email address, phone number, and even mailing address. It will come up in search engine results for key words within the portfolio or even your name. It is possible to keep your website password protected, but it will not block search engine results from showing the information in their blurbs. CDs are much more privacy friendly, as you control who you send them to and unless it is given away or stolen in some way, your private information stays private.
So, there you have it. Figure out which way is best for your and plan on going with that method. You could even do both, as I do, if you’d like. Just have a plan in place before we get started in the next part on deciding a design.
