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Library

Making Your Student Portfolio: Home

A guide to necessary tools & knowledge needed to construct your student portfolio

Considerations

Things to keep in mind when creating your portfolio:

  1. Privacy - Safeguard both your privacy and anyone else's that might be included in your artifacts. Strip out anything you don't want found on the web: your address, email, phone number, etc.
  2. Make it easy to navigate - Once you start, let someone else try it out. If they have trouble navigating your site then others will too.
  3. How does it look on different devices? Test on a few different computers/phones/tablets to be sure the site is usable.
  4. Be creative - Look at examples and search for more. All of the free tools mentioned in this guide let you customize templates, so make it your own.
  5. Be professional - Creating a portfolio is becoming a valuable skill and increasingly valued by people considering you for internships, jobs and educational opportunities. Use this as an opportunity to create something you would be proud to show off.
  6. Give credit - If you use photos that aren't your own, be sure and give credit by linking to the original source. A great tool for finding images licensed for use is CC Search.
  7. Refer back to the rubric  (AAT rubric) - This will let you know what you need in your reflections, which artifacts to include, etc.

Examples

Weebly

JimDo

Wix

Google Sites

Deciding which tool to use


As you evaluate which website builder to use, keep in mind some of the following items:

Advertising

Most free services require advertisements of some kind on your web pages in exchange for the free service. Pick a service that is less obtrusive in their advertising. The domain name of your site will also have the name of whichever service you pick in most cases.

Privacy

Google Sites allows you to limit who can view to individual people or the Chesapeake College community. JimDo allows you to password-protect pages if you want to, limiting who has access - Weebly charges for this feature.

Apps

JimDo and Weebly offers apps for Android and iOS that allow you to do some editing on those devices while Google Sites does not.

Ease of Use

While both are pretty straightforward, Weebly and JimDo are generally considered a bit easier to learn than Google Sites because of their simplified interface. However - Google Sites has recently revamped their interface making it much more inline with Google Docs (very simple and clean).

Multimedia

Google Sites, JimDo and Weebly can embed Youtube Videos PDF files. Google Sites integrates well with Google Docs.  JimDo limits the size of files you can upload (500 MB total and 10 MB per file) while Google Sites does not. 

Themes

JimDo's themes are more modern and attractive than Google Sites' more basic themes. It is easier to create a more visually appealing portfolio using JimDo. Do the templates work on mobile devices?

Free Website Builders

Here are some of the many resources available for creating a free website. Creating a free account is pretty easy with all of them so you can try a few and get a feel for the differences.