My E-Portfolio

The day has come that my E-Portfolio is finally finished.  I am looking forward to see what my classmates have come up with themselves when they present today and Thursday.  I am very proud of my own work and I have been showing my E-Portfolio off to my family as well as a couple of friends already.  This final project helped me a lot with using blogger and I believe that I will go back to this page to make updates as well as continuing to blog beyond ETAD 470.  I also have been thinking of what uses I could use a blog in my future classroom.  I think it would be a good idea to use a blog to post daily class notes and deadline dates for assignments.  This way if students were absent they could go to the blog and catch up on what they have missed.  This way they are responsible for the days they missed and the opportunity is there for them to catch up and then that way I would not have to deal with filling them in on what they missed the following class.  I dealt with this a lot through internship where students would miss a class and come up to me either before or after class or during lecture to ask what they missed.  It would also be a quick reminder if they were unsure of certain due dates for assignments as well as dates for quizzes and exams.

Volunteer Work

I am currently volunteering at Pleasant Hill Elementary School on the west side of Saskatoon.  I am going there in the mornings before school starts for an hour to promote physical activity.  When I get there I open the equipment doors in the gymnasium with a few of my fellow colleagues so that students who come to school early can be physically active and play in the gym before regular classes start.  I have little experience working with elementary students since I am a secondary teacher, but as I continue to go there I am enjoying it more and more.  I am learning a few of the students' names and building relationships with some of them.  It is quite delightful to bring smiles to these students faces.  Most of them have tough lives out of school.  For them to come to school and enjoy coming to school in the morning to play games, meet new friends and gain social skills is really important for them as they grow up.  There is a variety of equipment Pleasant Hill School owns and most of the little ones are changing equipment by the minute.  They see some of the older students play certain games so they want to be like them and do the same activities they are doing.  They have been respectful to me and my colleagues and are very good with sharing equipment and putting equipment away when they are done with it.

Our Blindness

Last week I went to church, the priest's sermon was about how Jesus healed a blind man.  The moral of the story is much more than Jesus can heal people.  It is how people today are blind to the world.  We all need to accept change because the world is forever changing.  Nowadays our elders are not aware and couldn't be bothered to learn about the new technology as they find it is difficult to accept this change.  They hear about devices like ipods, ipads and social networking sites such as facebook and tweeting, but still many decide to ignore these new technological devices and social networking sites.  We are taught in education that we need to change lessons once we try them and modify them afterwards to make improvements.  However, there are still a lot of teachers that present the same lesson year after year without any changes.  Since it worked 40 years ago, teachers figure it is still a good lesson today.  This is not the case, a lot has changed over the past 40 years, therefore we need to modify our lessons and make them relative and up to date to with the world today.

Final Project Proposal

Why have you chosen to complete an e-portfolio?

I have finally chosen to do an e-portfolio for my final project in ETAD 470.  It took me awhile to decide if I should do an e-portfolio or a Web Quest.  Then I had to decide on which program I would make my website onto.  I have made a website last year on dreamweaver for Jay Wilson's class so I am somewhat familiar with the Dreamweaver program so I thought of going that route for my website.  However, I changed my mind and am going to make the web-site through blogger.  After thinking it over I think it will be easiest to do it on blogger because I am familiar with how blogger works.


What professional uses does an e-portfolio have for you?


An e-portfolio has many uses for me as a professional and potential teacher.  I have chosen to do an e-portfolio so I can store all my job application documents in one place.  Having them in an e-portfolio on blogger will have these documents neatly organized.  This will be very useful in the future for when I need to electronically send out job applications to potential future employers.  By having an e-portfolio I can send future employers the URL to find my blog where all my documents are on the web, then future employers can locate these documents all in one place by a click of the mouse.




What content do you plan to include?


On my e-portfolio I plan to have an e-portfolio home page that includes a picture of myself and a little introduction to the viewer.  On the top right hand side of this page you will see various links to the following information and documents: For example, Blog, which will include my current blogs that I started earlier this year, an About Me page, on this page will be a couple of paragraphs that tell the viewer or employer where I come from and a little information so the viewer/employer can get to know me better.  The next link is my E-Portfolio Home Page, which I already said will have a picture of me with a little introduction, next will be My Teaching Philosophy, here I will explain what I value most importantly and my vision as a future teacher.  I will also provide links to the following documents: My Cover Letter, Resume with references, a character reference, Final Internship Assessment, and a sample Lesson Plan.  I will embed these documents by using a site called Scribd.  Here viewers and future employers can see a preview of my documents and then if they wish to print off a hard copy or download the document all they have to do is hit full screen or download and the document is there easier to read and ready to be printed.


What graphic design considerations have you taken into account for the look of the e-portfolio.


Well as mentioned before I will be embedding my documents through the program Scbrid.  Here the viewer can see a smaller preview of the picture or document and if needed they can always enlarge the picture or document by hitting fullscreen.  Here is a snapshot preview of my E-Portfolio Home Page that you will see with a picture of myself with the following links I mentioned previously on the right side of the page beside my picture.

The other links to the certain pages will look very similar but with the appropriate document that corresponds to the link that was clicked.

What concerns do you have about the process?  How do you plan to address these concerns?


A few concerns I have about creating this website is essentially the process of creating the website in general.  I am still fairly new to web design and I am sure I will have a lot of questions along the way on how to go about things.  To address these concerns Professor Ross will be around for four work periods that she has allotted to us to finish our webpages, during that time she can answer any questions I may have along the way.  If all goes well with embedding my documents I do not think I should have much of a problem with creating the web-site, but if I do have problems that will definitely be another one of my concerns during the process.