This past week in class, in addition to talking about digital identity, Dr. McClurken prompted us to work on our own digital presence. Our assignment – build a digital portfolio. I have had an existing personal domain since I created a website for my HIST 299 class in which I made it a subdomain of, but I’ve never really touched it because I quite frankly didn’t know what to do with it. I knew I wanted it to be a sort of landing hub for all of my work to jet off from, and since taking this class I’ve grown much more confident in my website building skills, so the first thing I did was publish pages as a general guide for what I wanted to put up. As I’m writing this, there is currently a home page, a page with general information about me, a page for my history projects, a page for my teaching portfolio, and a place for a blog. This took some time to nail down because I had so many ideas like a page listing out all the classes I’ve taken at UMW or a page for my resume, but I soon realized that sometimes less is more.
I’ve learned not just from this week’s discussion but from discussions we’ve had previously about websites that it’s important that everything on a site can flow together, be organized, and be informational without doing soooo much that it becomes overwhelming. My website is a work in progress, and of course it is I’m still going to do new things in the future, but I’m very proud of what I currently have out there. My history projects section shows all different topics I’ve covered, and all different ways I’ve done projects whether it be documentaries, websites, social media, or papers. My teaching portfolio shows all the different ways I can differentiate for students as well as my growth over time as I’ve also included some lessons I wrote when I was in high school.
I’m starting to get to the point in the semester where I’m thinking about what I’m going to get out of my classes and what I’m going to take with me in the future, and this week’s topic really jumpstarted that internal discussion for me. Building my digital portfolio was such a cool experience in the way that it made me reflect on all the work I’ve done in my academic career. Even more so, it made me appreciate the opportunity to learn more about how we can use technology and digital tools to showcase that work whether it be for personal or professional reasons and connect with the people around us.
Check out my personal website here: graysondonohoe.com
