Many writing teachers require students to submit a portfolio of their work at the end of the semester. This portfolio contains a range of materials such as drafts of major papers, peer reviews, short writings, and a reflection statement. The portfolio serves as a valuable means of documenting your process and evolution as a writer throughout the course.
Digital writing tools have made it possible to build portfolios in a number of ways. They also have enabled new methods of documenting process. For example, Google Docs now saves a history of comments from everyone who works on your document. The history chronicles the evolution of your paper and even keeps a record of suggestions and responses after you identify them as resolved. This useful feature may eliminate the need to keep or submit multiple drafts.
Many writing programs employ digital portfolios, in the form of a website containing embedded versions of your documents. You’ll probably have some flexibility in what platform you use: Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, or CarbonMade.
Perhaps the most commonly used portfolio system is the New Google Sites. This platform allows users to build a portfolio quickly.
Most writing teachers who use Google tools will ask you to compose all of your material in the Google Drive. That way, you can easily embed the documents rather than having to upload them as separate files. Composing in Google Drive from the start also makes peer review, revision, and other work more manageable. When you embed documents into your Google site, any changes you make to them update automatically on your site. This beats having to shuffle and re-upload files over and over again.
You can visit Google’s official tutorials for an in-depth explanation of how to build and manage a site:
https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9314941?hl=en&ref_topic=9296431
This screenshot gives a brief overview of the tools available in Sites:
Organize your Google Drive to make building your site easier. For example, create separate folders for major projects and short writings. Doing this early on in the semester will also increase your productivity. The last thing you want during finals week is to spend unnecessary time hunting down documents on your computer.
Make sure to adjust the sharing permissions so your instructor and others can view them. You may need to confirm access for each document you embed. Visit the Google Sites help page for more information. The following screenshots illustrate how to adjust your sharing settings.
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Many writing programs gather digital portfolios for assessment. Your instructor should ask you explicitly to set your sharing permissions so that other teachers can access your work. Although Google does allow users to share folders of documents, doing so still may not guarantee access to individual documents depending on how you embed them. You may need to manually check the sharing settings on each document to confirm.