The most time on your e-portfolio should be spent on writing your posts that showcase the work that you have done.
For a starting e-portfolio, you should have at least four postings showcasing your work or experience. You want to have enough content to make it worthwhile for someone to take a look at. Later, you can add more postings... ideally, you want to make regular updates every few weeks or months to showcase the latest things you have done.
A good posting should contain the following:
- clear, short, title of project or experience you are showcasing
- well-written, concise paragraph or two describing the project
- picture of some aspect of the project (e.g. you could show an image of the first page of a marketing report or communications MS PowerPoint presentation)
- link to a portion or the full project (e.g. link to a Word file containing your report). Make sure you do not disclose any confidential information though. If your project was for an external organization, make sure you request permission to feature all or parts of the work.
- In some cases you may want to contain other related hyperlinks (e.g. links to companies that you mention in your posts).
Here is a sample posting from a student's e-portfolio.
This posting provides a good overview of the skills she learned from the project (i.e. developing a marketing plan). There is a good image from her project included in her posting and there is a hyperlink (final assignment) to the actual assignment (a MS PowerPoint file). An employer could find evidence of her abilities by looking at her work (something not possible with a simple resume).
In order to develop this type of post, you need to be familiar with posting basics (described in Step 2) such as basic formatting and creating hyperlinks). It doesn't take too long to get up to speed with this... if you're stuck with any formatting issue, try the Blogger help menus.
You will also need to be comfortable with finding or creating images that you can use in your posting.
The following section provides some tips on adding images...
Adding images
You can add an image to your posting using the "Add Image" icon (picture of mountains and sky).
Here is a link to Blogger's Help section with instructions on posting pictures.
Before adding an image though, you will first need to have an image saved that you can upload or be able to link to an existing image already on a website (you would normally need to get permission to link to an existing image on another website though so you should stick to using your own images that you have saved to your computer).
You can find photos on the Internet or use your own photos. Here are three sites that offer different forms of "creative commons" copyright where you can get images for free and legally... more details on the licensing is available on the sites.
Flickr Creative Commons
Open Photo
Creative Commons Search
You can also create your own images by using the Print Screen (PrtScr) key... this will take a picture or screen shot of whatever you see on your monitor. This is ideal for "taking a picture" of the cover page of a report.
You can then open up MS PowerPoint, click on the opening slide, and then select paste. This will paste the screen shot image into the MS PowerPoint slide.
Adjust image if necessary
You can use MS PowerPoint as a mini-graphics editor by using the Picture toolbar in MS PowerPoint 2003 version or the Format tab in MS PowerPoint 2007.
In MS PowerPoint 2003, if you don't see the Picture toolbar, from the main menu options in MS PowerPoint, go to View | Toolbars | and then select Picture (if you see a check mark next to Picture, this means you already have the Picture toolbar opened).
In MS PowerPoint 2007, you need to first click on the picture (the one you created by using the PrtSc key) before you will see the Format tab.
One of the most useful tools on the Picture toolbar (in MS PowerPoint 2003) or from within the Size group on the ribbon in MS PowerPoint 2007 is the cropping tool. You can use this cropping tool to cut parts of your image that you don't want. This is different than resizing your image since cropping cuts part of your image off as selected rather than just changing the size but maintaining an image when you resize.
You can see the cropping tool in the picture below... it is circled in red. Note: this is using MS PowerPoint 2007.
Saving images
Now that you have tidied up your image, you can save the image by right-clicking on the image within the MS PowerPoint slide and select "Save as Picture".
Enter a descriptive file name and then select the down arrow for the Save as Type field so that the GIF or JPEG format is selected.
Upload image to posting
Now that you have saved the image, it is now time to upload to your posting. Select the "Add Image" icon (the mountain and blue sky icon)... when you click this icon, the "Upload Images" window pops up where you can browse to the location of your image, choose a layout (left, center or right) and the image size
Once you have made at least four postings, you can move on to Step 6 -- modifying the look and feel of your e-portfolio.
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