In the last few chapters, you learned about your profile page, dashboard page, files, journals, plans, and notes. You saw how you can add your profile information, files, and folders to your dashboard page, using some of the blocks provided. You learned that your profile page and dashboard pages are special types of page in Mahara. In this chapter, you are going to find out more about how to showcase your content by using pages. You will see how standard pages differ from your profile page and dashboard page, including which extra blocks you have to choose from. You will also see how to control who has access to your pages as well as how to group your pages together into collections. Finally, you will learn how to export your portfolio.
In this chapter you will:
- Create a new page from scratch
- Share your page with others
- Limit the length of time for which you allow access to your page
- Learn how to copy pages
- Create a collection of pages
- Look at a guide for assessing the quality of your pages
- Export your portfolio
In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Mahara, you were introduced to the concept of being able to create web pages in Mahara, which are called pages. You also got a glimpse of how easy it is to use the drag-and-drop facility to add blocks to a page when tailoring your profile page and dashboard page.
Pages are great! They are one of the stand-out features of Mahara and we think you are really going to enjoy learning to use them. Pages, like journals, are an excellent tool for reflection. The difference between the two is that a journal is very text orientated with a user reflecting on a topic in writing (usually with an image or video to supplement the text), and pages are more flexible, allowing you to pull in content from a wide range of sources (both from your own portfolio or freely available on the web) by using the blocks feature.
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Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks: | |
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I often compare pages to photocopied handouts. They are representations of content for colleagues to refer to. The beauty of them is that they are so easy for anyone to make! |
You can include a variety of items in your page such as text, images, external media, profile information, and journals. When you have done that, you can rearrange them how you wish by changing the page layout.
Pages are not only for personal reflection on a topic, but they are also great for presenting information to others in a beautifully simple web display.
You can control access to your pages, meaning you get to decide who sees your pages and when.
Let's look at some of the things that you can do with pages in Mahara:
You could present all of your ideas related to one of the topics in a course you are taking. This could be for your own reference only or you may choose to share access to this page with your tutor or classmates:
- You could use a page to explore and express your thoughts on a particular aspect of your social or family life, such as a family holiday. This is likely to be private, and something you would only share with other members of your family.
- You could use a page as a tutor to present all of the important materials that your learners need to read, watch, listen to, and think about in preparation for a particular topic that they are going to study with you. Lots of lecturers prefer to use Mahara to present their work instead of doing so in a virtual learning environment such as Moodle. This may be partly because the lecturer's name (and avatar) will continue to be associated with the work presented in the Mahara page even after they retire or move on to another academic institution if their account is still available.
- You could use a page to present an ongoing progress report on a project you are doing at work. You might make a journal on an element of this page as well as making important files related to your project available for sharing.
- You could use a page to take notes on all of the thoughts, ideas, links, and so on, that you gather while you are attending a conference (if you have a wireless connection). You can then share the page with your colleagues after the event to show them what you have learned.
These are just a few examples, but of course there are potentially hundreds of different things that you could use a Mahara page to achieve.