Up to now, most of these posts have concentrated on building a portfolio for employability. That’s fine, and a very good reason in itself to build an e-portfolio, but by adding some of the work you’ve done to your portfolio you can do much more.

First, from an employability point of view, you can provide evidence to back up any claims you’re making in your CV. You can also make your CV that much more interesting by including links to the things you’ve done that you’re most proud of. Secondly, though, a portfolio doesn’t have to be used solely for the purpose of getting a job. They are sometimes used for educational assessment, or they can be used as a sort of self advertisement. Like it or not it’s quite common to “Google” new acquaintances these days, so you might want to show the best of yourself on the Internet and an e-portfolio is a good way to do that.

So, what artefacts can you add to Portfolios.lincoln? The simplest, and in many ways the most useful is the “Text box” as this can be used to describe any other artefact or group of artefacts, and of course, can become an artefact in itself.

Text box

You find the text box by clicking on the “General” tab in the view editor.

. As usual, just drag it to the column in which you want it to appear. You should give it a title, as if you don’t it will just default to “text box”. There are some basic word processing tools for you to write a short introduction. You can import images, change the font and colour of the text and if you are familiar with HTML, (the markup language used to write web pages) you can add slightly more advanced formatting to the text box. (Although, frankly, this feature needs a little bit more work at the moment.)

Adding files to a view.

Remember the post on uploading files? Well, here’s how to put your files into a view. You have a choice. You can add either a whole folder, or a single file. You can also add images and HTML files into your portfolio. [nggallery id=”Add_file_blocks”]

Drag the relevant icons into the appropriate place in view. Each icon gives you a range of choices.

Dragging the A folder icon into your view will, as you might expect, ask you to select one of the folders you have created. Note that you can only select one folder at a time. If you want to show multiple folders in your view, then just drag the folder icon into your view again, and select a different one. Note, that if your folder contains images, the view will display a list of thumbnails (very small versions of your images) along with the file names.

Dragging thefiles to download icon into your view gives you a list of all the files you have uploaded. You can select as many of these from the list as you like. The user will be presented with the option to download the files you have chosen to their own computers.

Dragging the An image icon into your view offers, as you might expect a list of all the images you have uploaded. However, it’s important to note here that images are not automatically resized. You have to choose the width in pixels when you upload the image. (The picture will be scaled according to the width you enter)

1 column = 800 pixels
2 column = 400 pixels
3 column = 250 pixels
4 column = 200 pixels
5 column = 150 pixels

Note that these are only guidelines, and are based on symmetrical layouts. If you have chosen an asymmetrical layout you may need to experiment further with width.

You can give each image a title, and you also have the option to show the description of the image you entered when you uploaded the file.

If you write web pages, you can save HTML files to Portfolios.lincoln and you can include these in your portfolio by dragging the Some HTML icon into your view. Again, you’ll get a list of files to choose from.

The last type of file that you can embed is a media file. There are two options here. You can upload your own media (video or audio podcasts) or you can embed files from video sharing sites. Currently you can use You tube, Google Video, Teacher Tube and Scivee.tv.

If you want to embed one of your own files, then drag the embedded media icon into your view.

. This will present you with a list of the media files you have uploaded. Select the file you require, and choose the width and height of the display. (This isn’t quite so important with an audio podcast as it will simply show the play controls.)

One of the drawbacks with embedding your own media files is that video files do tend to use a lot of space. Portfolios.lincoln gives you 50mb of disk space by default, but if you have a lot of video clips, you may prefer to share them on YouTube, or a similar site.

If you do you can embed them into your portfolio by dragging the external video block into your view.

. This time, you must copy the “embed code” from the video sharing site, and paste it into the video URL field. You MUST also set a height and width in pixels for the video clip.

In the next post, I’ll look at how you can set up a blog in Portfolios.lincoln, and how you can add it to your views. If you are already blogging, using a different platform such as WordPress or Blogger, I’ll illustrate how you can add that to your portfolio,