Building Your Showcase E-Portfolio

All Honors English Nine students are required to build and maintain a Power Point Showcase Portfolio¹ for their best and/or favorite work.  Follow the guidelines below to fulfill this requirement.

Part I: Preparation

1. Review The Portfolio Itself, especially Option 1: Showcase Electronic Portfolio with Classroom Notebook.

2. Review the Electronic Presentation Rubric.  Always keep these criteria in mind as you build your Showcase E-Portfolio.

3. Be sure you have the following materials in your Showcase E-Portfolio: mission statement and goals, student vitae, reading and writing logs, and Current Learning Reflection Essay.  The rest is up to you.  To begin, you should have at least two pieces of your best work, though you are welcome to add as much as you want.²  As the rest of the year unfolds, we will add more as desired.

4. Now that you've selected what you want to be in your Showcase E-Portfolio and have it all typed up³, it's time to plan out your power point presentations.  To do this, create thumbnail sketches of how you would like each slide to appear and how you want them to link together.  I suggest using some blank white paper and maybe putting two to four slide sketches on each; I also recommend creating a linked web for the structure of your presentation.⁴ The sketches and web will be checked for points.

5. Go over The Portfolio Itself and the Electronic Presentation Rubric again to be sure you are crystal clear on the expectations.

Part II: Building and Maintenance

1. Begin with your main slide, creating a unique theme with color, fonts, and graphics. Experiment, rearrange, and rebuild. Play with it until you feel comfortable with the program and like the look, feel, and theme of your e-portfolio.

2. Download graphics, sounds, whatever you need as desired. Keep checking your power point for size - remember, a floppy disk can only hold 1.44 megs. If your slides/whole presentation is getting near the limit, save the one you have as is on a disk and start a new one. Later we can put these together in one folder on a hard drive or CD and link them together. Do this as often as you need to.

3. Now put together your other slides, using your main theme as your guide. Don't forget that you can simply include already typed materials as files that you can link to from power point.

4. Build your links as needed. (Remember, webbing your work is much more fun for the viewer and allows you to express special relationships between your works.) I think the best way to do this is to create your text or graphic for you link, then right click on it. From there, click action settings and tell it what you want it to do on a mouse click. This works for virtually anything in power point!

5. Review your site again for quality using the Electronic Presentation Rubric and submit it for evaluation.

6. Update as required in class or as desired at home.

Footnotes

¹If you are maintaining an online e-portfolio, you should still build one of these unless you know for sure your English site will still be running next year. Be absolutely sure on this because you will be expected to have this next year .

²Beware of disk space! Power Point portfolios can grow bigger than your floppy disk space in a big hurry.  Here is a way to get around this problem: Build several smaller power points organized by section or type of work and save them to separate disks.  In each of these smaller power points, build in links to the other ones so that when we put them together in a folder on a hard drive or on a CD, they will all work together.

³I highly recommend simply putting your longer written work into your power point as a link to the .doc file.  Just make sure your .doc file is included with the power point files and your link will open the writing! This eliminates many difficulties you may run into with easy of reading, copying & pasting, and slide formatting.

⁴Remember that you can design your e-portfolio to be linear (slide to slide, one after another) or webbed (linked so that the viewer can wander around your site in any way he/she sees fit, like a web page).  Webbed is much preferred.