 Hello and a very warm welcome to DCU. You will come across a number of technology platforms that you will find useful in your DCU journey. This video will briefly introduce you to Loop Reflect, your learning portfolio. Your learning portfolio, or ePortfolio, is available to all students and staff and it can be used to record, reflect on and showcase evidence of your learning. In effect, what you can do is to create an online space that can hold many forms of media including text, hyperlinks, images, video and more. ePortfolio and Loop Reflect is used in DCU for many purposes. You may come across it as part of your assessment. You may use it to record your work experience on the intro program or for other extracurricular activities such as the student engagement award and the mentoring scheme. Plus of course, this is your private space so you may use it to record your own studies or interests. So the first thing you'll need to know is how to access an Activator Loop Reflect account and that can be done from inside of Loop. On your dashboard you'll find a quick links panel and the very first button is DCU Reflect. If you click on that, that will automatically activate your Loop Reflect account and bring you directly to your dashboard. From this point on, you can access Loop Reflect through Loop or by going directly to reflect.dcu.ie. The username and password for Loop and Loop Reflect are the same. And now just a quick orientation to your dashboard. You'll see that there are three main sections. This section allows you to create a new page or a collection which is just a number of pages brought together so it looks like a website. This middle section, Manage My Portfolios, will enable you to have a look, access and edit any of your e-portfolios. The Loop Reflect logo will always bring you back to your dashboard. The final section is Share My Work. And just to note to you that everything that you create, every page that you create within Reflect is private and it cannot be seen or shared with anybody without you clicking on Share My Work. At this point you can actually allow somebody else to view and comment on your work if you wish. Also on the dashboard you'll see a prominent link to help and you'll be able to click on this to access a lot of information that will assist you on your journey in using Loop Reflect. So at some point over your DCU journey, you're going to be tasked with creating a new e-portfolio page, whether it's for assessment or work placement or other. So from the dashboard, what you need to do is come to the Create New section and click on Page. You'll need to give your page a title. I'm just going to call it Demo Page. You can give it a description if you wish but there's no requirement to. You can add a tag if you want to categorize your page and review later. And you'll notice that there are additional settings here which you can explore at Leisure. But all you really need to do now is click on Save. And this is your first e-portfolio page created. As you can see it's completely blank right now and what you will be able to do is add on blocks or sections to enable you to add content. Those sections are added by dragging the plus onto the screen. Here you have a choice of what type of content you want to put on your page. Remember e-portfolio is very flexible and will allow you to include many different forms and types of content from text, images, videos, links to other materials in your Google Drive and various other elements. For the first example, I'm just going to put on a text block. This is the most flexible kind of block. As you can see it's very similar to a typical word processor. So I'm going to give it a title. Let's just give it a title of text. And here I can add on text simply by typing. I can add on a link to the DCU website if I so wish. And to change it from text to a hyperlink all you need to do is click on the word or double click to highlight the word that you want to serve as the link text. Go to the toolbar and click on the hyperlink. Here you can simply type in the link and click on save. Reflect will automatically add in the HTTP for you. And that is a section that will now have text and a hyperlink. You can also add an image into this block and that's why it's the most flexible kind of block. So click on the add image icon from the toolbar and click on the word image. Here you can then choose whatever image file you would like to add. Just going to scroll down and pick a file and click on open. Then you can submit. So as you can see this image is a little big for the screen that I'm working in. Beside the word count here there's a double headed arrow. Your mouse will turn into a double headed arrow enabling you to increase the size of the space you're working in. When you do that you'll see that images just like in Word have blocks at the corners which you can drag to increase or decrease the size of the image until it's suitable. All you need to do then is click on save. And that is your first block on the page. New to this version of Reflect is the ability to change the shape and to reorganize blocks on your page automatically. So you can see simply by grabbing on the drag handle in the bottom right hand corner you can change whether a particular section or block stays. To add another block just drag onto the page and this I'm going to create a video block. So I'm going to use the external media option and you can give it a title if you so wish. Come down and all you need to do is pop in the URL of the YouTube video or Vimeo video that you want to include. So going out to YouTube all you need to do is right click and copy that URL, return to your ePortfolio page and paste in. Click, scrolling down you can then click on save. And now I can rearrange this page as I wish. Perhaps I want to resize this block and drag it around. I can do the same this block and then I can rearrange them on the page so that they are beside each other. And that is your first ePortfolio page created. To display it or view it as it would be you click on the display icon on the right hand side and that's how this page will display if you have created it for assignment and you have submitted it to your lecturer. At any point you can click on the pencil, go back in and edit it. Just to show you where that page lives or is saved by going back to the dashboard if I now click on manage my portfolios that ePortfolio page is right there that I can click on and continue to edit at any point. Finally, you may be required to submit your ePortfolio if it is an assessment and to do that you will do it in loop. So when your ePortfolio page is completed it is still private to you not shared with anyone else including your lecturer. So you will need to go to the loop page for your module. Scroll down until you see where you need to submit your assignment. Click on it. Scroll down and choose to add submission. When you do this as loop and loop reflect are connected you will be given a list of all of the ePortfolios that you have created. You may only have one or two and all you'll need to do is check the one that you wish to submit. Scroll down and then click on save. And that's how you submit your ePortfolio so that it's then accessible for your lecturer.