I am currently suffering from a form of writer’s block. It’s rather a long story, but here goes. During the Fall semester we were required to create a Digital Learning Hub. I started with a WordPress. I had been using the site for my blog since our very first class in the IT&DML 6th year and I shared the URL with a few educators in my personal learning network. I spent a significant amount of time familiarizing myself with WordPress, making stationary pages and adding new content. Overtime, I decided against the WordPress. I was struggling with formatting pages and using WPAdmin and moved over to a Google Site.
I had a Google Site for my school but it was just a placeholder. The first version only identified my name and my teaching assignment. I referred students and parents to visit the team website or my Google Classroom for more information. Charged with creating a digital learning hub I completely revamped the site. I added in lesson plans, multimodal tutorials, and tech etiquette. Knowing the program culminated in a digital portfolio I have been continuously adding to my site over the course of the program. Now, I need to create a new site but I am not ready to move on from my old site. Therein lies my writer’s block. How do I move on from my creation. How do I look past all of the time and energy that went into that work and start over? The positives are that a lot of the content can be copied easily as it was created in Google Drive. This does limit me to making my digital portfolio on a platform that is compatible with Google. I have considered using another Google site but it feels redundant and my enthusiasm for the project stalled.
Well, it just happened. In writing this post I have broken through my writer’s block! I was reviewing platforms that are compatible with Google and G+ popped up. I am going to investigate using a G+ community. The communities are easy to create and easy for users to navigate. G+ allows you to design the layout by adding categories and the “news feed” read is expected of modern digital platforms. Best of all users can easily interact with my digital portfolio making it both shiny and sticky! As W. Ian O’Byrne states in his blog titled Use Google Sites to Build Your Own Digital Learning Hub, “Shiny means that it looks polished and everything is thoughtfully laid out. Sticky means that it draws the reader in, and provides some interactivity.” I can make an open community or decide to go with invitation only. The excitement is back!
keelygarden 
Keely, this is a great idea! I never considered G+ for a portfolio, but when I think about the organization and features it does seem like it would be a great place to house your portfolio. I’m very interested to see what you create!
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Keely, good to hear you broke the writer’s block! I too am experiencing this at the moment and feel the same way about moving on from my blog/digital learning hub. I think that is pretty creative going with Google+ for your digital portfolio. For categories you could possibly include each class in the program, and some of the main projects completed from that particular class. I never thought of using Google+ as anything other than a community for class, so I am very interested to see how yours comes out. Good luck!
-John V
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John I may have run into a stumbling block with G+. I cannot meet all of the elements of the rubric, specifically DESIGN. I am back to the drawing board…kg:)
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Keely,
G+ sounds like a viable option for presenting your work. In thinking about your content and how you want others to interact with it, G+ would allow others to interact with/react to it easily. It is certainly thinking outside of the box. Love it! Can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Reggina
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Reggina- That was my objective. I really wanted something more dynamic than a simple website but I may have to use sites as G+ doesn’t allow for any design.
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