In case you were absent one or both of the days we went to the computer lab to work on our portfolios, I wanted to write a post with instructions and recommendations.

How to Create Your Portfolio

1. Log in to the CUNY Academic Commons home page. Click on “Sites.”
2. You should see a button that says “Create a Site.” Click on that.
3. You will see 3 options: Group, Site, and Group + Site. Choose the one that is just “Site.”
4. Fill out the info and choose your settings however you like. The “site domain” is the URL you type in to get to your site. Choose “Portfolio” under the “Primary Purpose” option.
5. For the privacy settings, choose whatever you want, but know you will need to give me access to your portfolio at the end of the semester in order for me to grade it.
6. For the template, choose either “default” or “academic portfolio.” The portfolio template is designed for professors, not students, so you will still need to make changes.

How to Edit Your Portfolio

Once you create your site, you will see the same black CUNY Commons menu at the top of your screen just like you see when you’re on our course site.

1. Click on the name of your site in that menu to access your dashboard. Or, click “edit” on any page on your site.
2. The dashboard will look like the editing dashboard you used to write your “Analysis of an Ad” and “Data Collection” posts for our site, but with a lot more options in the sidebar. That’s because you’re the owner of your site!
3. In the lefthand sidebar, go to “Appearance” and then “Customize.”
4. Make whatever changes to your site that you want!
5. To add pages or posts, use the “pages” and “posts” options in the dashboard lefthand sidebar instead of Appearance.

How Do You Know What To Do?

Instructions and a rubric for what to include in your portfolio are here.

Links to examples of other students’ English 101 portfolios are here. 

You can design and organize your portfolio however you want– your assignments don’t need to be in a specific order. It should be what you think looks good, makes sense, and is easy for a user of your website to understand.

For WordPress Help

Just Googling your questions will likely yield a lot of helpful instructions, since WordPress works the same no matter what website is using the software. However, for WordPress help explicitly geared toward students, the Open Lab at City Tech (similar to CUNY Commons) has a lot of Help documentation specifically geared toward students and faculty. Click here for instructions on how to do many common tasks on your site! 

You will see my face in the sidebar there– working on the Open Lab is my other job! Feel free to also ask me or your classmates if you continue running into trouble.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.