The digital portfolio was the last assignment in the Concepts of Educational Technology class at Lamar University during the Masters in Educational Technology program. To be honest, when I started thinking about the digital portfolio, I felt completely overwhelmed and lost. As a part of the creation of our significant learning environments (CSLE, Harapnuick 2010), we were given the option of choosing the platform we were going to use to develop our portfolio. So I went searching for different options. In the beginning, I thought about Google sites in which the blog would be an embedded blogger. My biggest concern with this option was that I knew the portfolio would not be entirely mine since I would be creating it within my district’s domain. If I were to leave my district, I would have to do additional steps to migrate all my documents to a personal domain that I could take with me wherever I went. Also, I wanted to have a portfolio with a personal URL, my own domain, knowing that this option would make my portfolio appear more professional. So, I scratched this option.
I started searching for more information on the web trying to determine what was the best option. I found two comparison articles from websitebuilderexpert.com Website Builders Comparison Chart for 2018 and 5 Top Differences You Should Be Aware Of | Wix vs. WordPress 2018. This articles helped me make up my mind. I was debating over using WordPress or Wix. In the back of my head I knew I should be using WordPress. I really did not know everything about it at this point, but I knew that many of the best digital portfolios I had seen including my professor Dr. Harapnuik were made using this platform. Telling the truth, I was afraid of the very steep learning curve for WordPress that everybody was talking about, which would mean that I would have to invest more time to learn it, and time is what I didn’t have. Considering that I only had two weeks to develop my final product I opted up for using Wix which was very easy to use, and I created my full portfolio in just a few days. Still, I was not completely happy, I mean, it was nice, and it fulfilled the purpose, but it did not have the professional feeling that I was looking for. Also, I could not find a way to insert my social media feed and other features into the Wix website. At the end, I finished the class with a great learning experience. I learned how to use blogger.com, which I had never used before; weebly.com and also wix.com but WordPress was still on the horizon.
The following class, E-portfolio, was fast approaching. I had high expectations and was looking forward to having time to learn about WordPress finally and build a much stronger and professional-looking e-portfolio on a more robust platform. After reading Dr. Harapnuik’s How to Create Your E-portfolio, and 7 Reasons to Convert Your WordPress.com Blog to WordPress.org, one more time, I face a disjunctive, WordPress.com or WordPress.org, and there I went in my search for answers. After looking for a little while, I found an article from wpbeginner.com called WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org – Which is Better?. It was like somebody was thinking about me when writing this article it had all the answers that I was looking for pros and cons, and I finally decided to go with wordpress.org hosted by Bluehost. WordPress.org is giving me the freedom to have my own domain joannafunkhouser.org hosted by Bluehost which is the second most popular and reliable hosting company for a relatively low price. I must say that I’m pleased with my decision. My portfolio looks the way I wanted; I have the freedom to add features through plugins and Bluehost has an excellent customer service which I have called several times always having my problem solved at the end of the call. Yes, it took me several weeks of diving into WordPress through wpbeginner.com, and I don’t think I know half of what I could understand about my platform, but I surely have room to grow, and that itself is the most valuable reason. I know that if at some point I decide to take a different path with my digital portfolio it will support me and I will not have to move my content anywhere else anymore. So, cheers for WordPress.org!
REFERENCES
Harapnuik, D. (2010). Creating significant learning environments. It’s all About Learning Website. Retrieved from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=849
