 Thank you. I'm super excited to be here. It's my first Moodle Mood global Moodle Mood ever and I've never given a presentation to so many people. So thank you for coming to my presentation. I hope you won't leave disappointed. My name is Greg and today I'm going to talk to you about how I ended up using a Moodle site as a professional portfolio. And now before I start, before we dive in, I just want to explain that in the context of this presentation portfolio is understood as a tool that I use to showcase my work to other people. It's not a student portfolio solution like Mahara, for example. It's a tool that I use just to showcase my work. Okay, so let's dive in. Now I wasn't sure if there was going to be internet here and I think the Presidentist guide explicitly said not to rely on internet. So if you are connected, you can navigate to this URL. It's a very simple one, Moodleportfolio.com. And you can use these guest credentials to log in. If you're not online right now, you can use these credentials after the conference. I'm going to keep this account active for the duration of this conference. And then so you can dive in, you can look around. And if you have any questions and hopefully whatever I'm going to explain during this presentation is going to make sense. And obviously you can always mail me after the conference with questions, et cetera. So how did I come up with this idea? About two years ago I was between jobs and I realized I needed a professional portfolio. A lot of jobs for ed techs pre and post COVID now require you to have a portfolio. In other words, people want to see your work and you want to see what you've been working on. And I realized that I didn't have one. And I was actually surprised that I could get away without having a portfolio for such a long time. So I started looking online for portfolio solutions. And the more I searched online, the more confusing the whole experience became. Once my browser got enough cookies to realize I was looking for a portfolio solution, I was just bombarded with advertisements from generic website builders. And also at this stage I noticed that people tend to use these generic website builders, the likes of Wix and WordPress to build their portfolios. But they're essentially websites and they're more tailored for photographers, videographers and creatives. So I couldn't find anything specifically tailored for education. At that stage I knew that I wanted something that is open source. So it gives me complete control over my portfolio. That is more obviously tailored for education and something that I'm already familiar with. So I don't have to spend time learning a new technology or a new tool. And then I had that kind of eureka moment when I realized, well, I've got so much experience with Moodle. I've been working with Moodle for the last 10 years, started using it since version 2.4. Why not using Moodle as a portfolio site? And then that was it. That was the idea. And then next I had to spend some time actually thinking how I was going to build my portfolio. So I thought I would tell you a little bit about my journey to my own Moodle site. And once I decided to have my own Moodle site, I didn't really know what to do. I have experienced building courses, online courses, fully online courses, blended learning courses, building course components and training people to use Moodle. But I now had to do administration. I never had to install a Moodle instance, never had to upgrade it, never did any of the admin stuff. So I didn't really know. I got stuck, didn't really know what to do. And obviously Moodle Cloud came to the rescue. And I was able to set up a Moodle site in minutes, literally. So once I had that, I had my own Moodle site, then I started diving deeper and started thinking how I was actually using, how I was going to use Moodle to build a portfolio. A little bit after that, when I realized that I needed more control, and I don't know, maybe I'm a little bit of a control freak. So I just realized that Moodle Cloud wasn't really a perfect solution for me because I needed to install a theme. And I needed to install plugins, theme components and had control over my Moodle site. So I started working with a Moodle hosting company. There is a network of Moodle partners and depending on your geographical location, I'm sure you will be able to find a partner and they will be able to offer you a good deal on hosting. And the, I'm not going to mention the name. I used the company that's pretty well known and they have expertise in Moodle hosting. And as part of the deal, they agreed to install a theme that I really liked and I really needed. So I had that and once I had a theme, then I could start actually building a portfolio and thinking how I'm actually going to use these Moodle elements, Moodle site elements to develop my portfolio, which I'm going to talk about next. So and ultimately, after a while, after a couple of months, I realized, well, I really need a self-hosted Moodle site to be completely in control, to be able to uninstall, install different themes, to be able to install theme components, et cetera. So I just bought just website hosting and I worked with a hosting provider that actually had Moodle expertise. And I installed my own, well, they installed Moodle for me and this is where I am now at now. So this is just, I thought I would mention this journey I went through from Moodle Cloud to having my own Moodle site. Now, probably if you're thinking about doing the same you can, but you can probably also identify a solution that works for you and go straight for that. I just thought it would be a good idea just to tell you about my experience and the rationale why I ended up with the self-hosted Moodle site given the fact that it's costing me money. So I had to justify it somehow. So moving on. Now, these are the site elements and components that I'm kind of leveraging and using as part of my portfolio. Once I started working in theme and this is I think the theme is one of the most important part of your portfolio. There are a lot of themes out there. Some of them are free. Some of them are paid. Some of them have amazing features that you can use in your portfolio. Whether you are going to spend money on it, on a theme or whether you're going to get a free theme that's really up to you. A pro tip, if you find a theme that you like, there's a lot of premium Moodle themes. If it's going to cost you money, wait until the Christmas. This is what I do with most of my software purchases. Usually over Christmas you get 50% discounts in Black Friday deals and stuff like that. This is what I did and I managed to buy a pretty good theme for a 50% discount. That's it. Now, then, once I started digging deeper into themes, I noticed that a lot of themes allow you to build your own home page. This home page will become kind of like a storefront for your portfolio. If you look at my portfolio, my home page has a little introduction. It has, I boast my badges, my Moodle badges there as well. I put a little explanation of what the portfolio includes. There's an important overview section which is telling you what projects I've been working on. I usually use this kind of storefront of my Moodle portfolio just to show it to people who are interested in working with me. Then I give them access later on if they're interested. Then, obviously, I use a dashboard to showcase all of these projects and also a course page for these projects to showcase them. Now, I developed a template that is consistent. I present all the projects consistently so it's easy to navigate. Finally, the roles and permissions. Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail about this. I only have two minutes left. I'm using a custom students role to give people access to my portfolio, but I did have to go into roles and permissions and change a few things because I want everybody to have the same experience. For example, just an example, I prevented people from students, people accessing my portfolio from changing anything, adding blocks on course page or dashboard, etc. I just wanted to have that consistency. Moving on, also, you will find that very often you will end up curating the content of your portfolio site. Now, once you have it structured and everything, you will have to do some things. It's a good idea to do some things, to beautify your portfolio, to make it stand out, make it pop. There's a number of tools you can use, and this is just a very short list. Fund awesome is one tool that I use a lot. It's a kind of icon toolkit and library. I use these to build buttons, but also to have kind of nav bars or have a fancy order or unordered list with icons instead of bullet points, page dividers and things like that. These are vector based, but obviously, so they scale very well across devices, etc. I use lotty files to kind of have some kind of element of animation. I'm a big, I work with video a lot and in the past I know that getting animations onto a, not just Moodle, but web page was sometimes was very clunky, so here we are, you know, lightweight vector based animations that you can have with literally two lines of code. A bootstrap, obviously, that's one very important component, and there is a bootstrap session tomorrow actually by Sam from Catalyst, so I will be attending that. That's very useful. You can now easily add bootstrap components, and then free pick, flat icon and pixels to just generic websites for free graphic, etc. So just to sum up, I think there are several benefits of having your own portfolio. Just the portfolio itself gives you an opportunity to reflect on your projects, revise them, see what went wrong, improve things, it needs to be. But because I spend money on my portfolio, I think also it's proven to give me a lot of professional opportunities, professional development opportunities. And for example, learning a little bit about the backend, site administration, rows of permissions, I never had to do that. Also, finally an excuse to scale up on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and graphic and general web design. Okay, so that's it for me. Thank you. I want a little bit of a time. And here is a little lottie animation for you, so I enjoy that. So was there anything about setting up your own Moodle site that you found particularly difficult? Not really, not. Maybe plug-in installation. Sometimes I have, I get these dependencies errors, and that can be a little bit confusing. Again, I know now what dependencies are, and sometimes, especially with themes, there are different components that you have to install first. But, you know, it was a learning curve for me. So, but I think in general, installing things is fairly easy, you know. So, thank you. Hello. I was wondering how long did it take to develop this portfolio? I was expecting that question. So, like I said, it was a journey for me. So from Moodle Cloud, my first Moodle Cloud site to my self-hosted site, it was about a month, a month. But that's just because I was figuring out really what I wanted to have, whether I wanted to have a Moodle Cloud, whether I wanted to work with the e-learning partner or go for self-hosted. But once I had everything set up, I would say to configure all the roles and permissions, to put a few projects in to figure out what activities and resources within the course page I'm going to use, because there's a huge choice. And this is what makes Moodle stand out. You can use the file activity, you can use pages within to showcase your work. To put in six projects took me maybe two weeks. Yeah. And just if you're on my course page, if you scroll all the way down or the dashboard or the home page, there is a footer there that has links, images, icons to all of the things that power my portfolio. So if you're interested in learning more, you can go that. I know I'm using images as links. And if, Gavin, if you're here and you're watching this, I'm really sorry I'll work on that. I'll make it more accessible. Okay, thank you.