Technology Design Portfolio
Laura Revels
Student Mentor: Carla Lee
Assessment Code: TDT1
June 12, 2018
TDT1 – Task 1: Developing a Website
Website can be seen at: https://www.visualwisdom.com/
I am a Master Digital Storytelling Trainer who has been teaching and facilitating digital storytelling (DS) workshops for 10 years. Recently I have been teaching DS in-person and online for the last five years with the Alaska Community Health Aide Practitioner program. I have co-authored several peer-reviewed articles on DS and have participated in several research projects that demonstrated DS is a culturally-respectful way to share cancer education with the Alaska Native people and Community Health Aide Practitioners (CHAPs). I will be using personal experience as well as peer-reviewed articles I co-authored to develop an online storytelling course.
The intended audience are participants who want to learn digital storytelling and/or are Alaska Community Health Aide Practitioners (CHAPs). Their ages range from 25 to 65, and the learners predominantly work in Tribal health (public health) and have at least an associate’s degree. Most participants take the workshop as a way to learn how to work with community members to create their own first-person narrative around a wellness issue that is important to the individual and/or community.
For this assignment, I used my own personal website and a WordPress theme develop it. Images used for the website were images that I can use either in print or in asynchronous modules. To edit the images for the web, I used Photoshop and the Photoshop tools used were:
- Text tool to create text.
- Transform tool to resize logos.
- Image, Levels: used to adjust brightness or contrast.
- Image, Hue/Saturation
The images were my own personal photographs or public domain images. I chose images that will complement the storytelling website, print, and media module that is yet to be developed. More information about the graphics are in Task 2 – Graphics, which has already been submitted and graded.
To develop the website, I had already had web hosting services and owned a domain name and decided to use it for my TDT1 assignments. Once I logged into my site, I opened the Dashboard, and used the following tools/commands to develop the site:
- Appearance, Themes: I searched the Themes that were available with my webhosting service. The search term I used was “Responsive”, as I wanted a theme that could adjust to different screen sizes. After reviewing several, I chose the Panoramic Theme by Out the Box, the free version.
- After choosing the theme, I returned to Dashboard, and then selected Appearance, Themes, Customize to:
- Upload my logo and site identify information.
- Remove the default theme’s header image.
- To change the Homepage Settings to my latest posts instead of a static page.
- After these changes, I then clicked on Publish to make my website live on the internet.
- After publishing, I returned to the Dashboard area. Where I then selected Pages. In the Pages area, I created three additional pages: Graphics, Multimedia, and Print. I added text using the WordPress editor and inserted images that I already had curated (the original pages are in the Appendix after the revised pages). After publishing the web pages, I returned to the Dashboard.
- Once back in the Dashboard I selected: All Posts, Add New, where I developed content for the home page. This included:
- An About section explaining what the site was for and information about myself, including uploading an image of myself by using the Add Media command and placing on the right-hand side of my text.
- A Resources for Storytelling section where I posted links to articles I co-authored on DS, as well a link to where some of the digital stories from workshops I have facilitated.
- Other Storytelling Resources section where I posted links to two other storytelling websites.
- For the section headings, I used the built-in Heading 2 format and the paragraph format for the text. Once the text and image were added, I clicked on Publish to have the new content display on my homepage.
In my current work, I develop the web pages for our online modules, and consider myself at an intermediate skill-level for developing webpages and I also own a couple of other domains for some community groups that I manage, so I was already familiar with the Dashboard, choosing and customizing Themes, and adding text and media elements. There is still a lot about WordPress that is beyond my skill-level but I am open to learning and to create an online DS course using WordPress.
Appendix
- Revised PDF document of the website (click on to open up a PDF document that will open in a new window).