Image created by Samara Marin using Copilot 2024

When I started my ePortfolio, WordPress seemed like an empty box with nothing to offer. I chose my theme and filled in a few blanks. With each post and page, I learned a new trick, asked more questions, and took ownership of my ePortfolio. Slowly, this website became a reflection of me to other people when they searched for my name.

Even comparing my first post to my most recent post, it is easy to see how much has changed in two and a half months. The Growth Mindset is the first blog post I ever tripped over as I began this journey. The Learning Philosophies: Cognitive, Behavioral, Constructivist, and Connectivist, is the most recent post that I have created.

After taking a short look through both posts, I noticed that some differences are easily discernable. One of which is the more cohesive images in the latest post. This is explained in another one of my posts, Evolution of Images In My Blog. As I took ownership of my blog, I wanted the images to look more like I envisioned them in my head. So, I looked into different AI programs. Evolution of Images In My Blog goes into detail about how I struggled with Google Images for hours to find the perfect image for each section of my first post. Now, I simply struggle with typing the words to have the AI understand what I want.

Image created by Samara Marin using Copilot 2024

Once I solved the problem of getting the visual components of my website to work together, the next step was to connect my pages and posts. The problem was that up until I created my COVA page, I did not see anything on my website as a page except for my course landing pages. However, the information for COVA did not feel right as a post. So now the separation is in my menu system.

I moved “Technology in the Classroom” under Marin’s ePortfolio to give the menu a better look for now, and each of those are my pages. Eventually, I will start creating submenus when I feel subjects connect so the menu does not turn into twenty hyperlinks at the top of a page. All of my blog posts are in the blog, which today I discovered needed to be completed. Whenever I wrote a new blog post, the links to my older posts were impossible to find. I had to completely overhaul my blog page today by deleting the main block on my WordPress blog page and reinserting my blog into the page. The “next button” pictured below is now at the bottom of the page.

The three most recent blog posts are also auto-populated at the bottom of the website’s first page, the about me page.

Image created by Samara Marin using Copilot 2024

Many of the issues that I had with my initial posts were that I wanted the images to be smaller, but did not know how to do so within WordPress. Through playing with the features, I discovered these two block types.

The blog posts block lets me attach the feature image, summary, and hyperlink to the blog post(s) of my choice. I can choose specific ones or allow the block to cycle through the three newest posts automatically. The media and text block lets me set an image to the left or right of a paragraph of text, the way I did on the ePortfolio page.

All in all, despite feeling as though my ePortfolio has not changed much, through typing out this post, I am able to see how much has changed in such a short amount of time.