Book Image

Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Mahara ePortfolios helps you to use software as you follow an experiential learning cycle. In Mahara you can: Plan your learning. Do what you do and gather evidence of your competence as you do those things. View and organize your work by structuring your data in easy-to-make (web)pages and (mini-website) collections of those pages. Reflect on your learning by use of professional journals, engaging feedback on your pages and establishing and engaging in online communities who share a similar interest. Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to develop a feature-rich and highly personal electronic portfolio. Form a digital repository of reflective journals, action learning plans, presentations, reports, images and videos. Easily share this with your friends, family, tutors, students, project team and others using this step-by-step guide written in a clear and easy to learn manner.This book guides you to build an impressive e-Portfolio and to work in professional communities of interest within a Mahara walled garden. It brings to life the key features of Mahara which will help thoughtful people to display their artefacts coherently and to engage with like-minded peers professionally.This book introduces you to exciting features of Mahara framework and helps you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like project documents, pictures and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up single pages and collections of pages which organize these files, making these visible only to your own chosen peers, supervisors or friends. Then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create journals, learning plans, your professional resume, group spaces and forums which help you get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will be easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs.Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customized digital portfolio and display the artefacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mahara ePortfolios Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)


CPD is an essential element of many learning programs. It is the practice of keeping tabs on your skills and how they have improved over the course of time.

As you've seen, Mahara is already great for CPD — you can write journals logging your progress and display them in pages. You can also plan your actions using plans.

Sometimes, however, when monitoring CPD, it's necessary to have the ability to log more specific information related to the activity undertaken, for example the location of a CPD activity and the time spent on it. Some courses, for example, require you to demonstrate a specific number of hours of CPD before you can complete them.

Fortunately, the CPD Mahara artefact allows you to do just that. Built in a similar way to plans, it allows users to log their own CPD activities, and group these into lists for easy management. You may, for example, have a group of CPD activities for each course undertaken or for each personal area of interest...