ePortfolio on Google Site
When I first thought of a way to gather all my evidence as online documents, rather than print outs and photocopies that gradually fill up a clearfile every year, I knew that Google Sites was going to be the way. It’s seemless link into Google Drive allows for me to create an “Evidence” folder, and then link to any document inside those folders. Using the Practising Teacher Criteria as a guide and a structure, I created folders inside the ‘Evidence’ folder, and began collating and sorting the evidence appropriately.
However, at a NZEI cluster meeting where I shared this with other teachers in the area, many were concerned that hosting this on the school’s accounts would be problematic should one leave that school and move onto another. They mentioned that being able to somehow host this themselves on a personal site would be better.
Luckily, this isn’t too hard to do, even if you’ve already set up your site on your school account like I had!
Gmail or Google Account
If you have your own personal Gmail account, you essentially already have Google Sites. Next to your account name, there is the Google Apps ‘9-square’ button. Clicking on this will open up the available apps, including Google Sites (hopefully!) If you haven’t already created your site, you can create a new one by clicking on the red ‘Create’ button.
However, if you need to move your existing Google Site to your own domain, or your personal account, then you’ll need to complete the following steps. These can be found at E-Portfolio Apps. I have added to these to match the current Google Apps UI.
Moving a Google Site out of an Educational Domain
Steps to take place under the Educational Domain:
- To begin, open the site from within the educational domain.
- Go to More Actions (
) -> Manage Site.
- Select the “Sharing & Permissions” (or select this from the More Actions button in step 2).
- In the section titled “Invite people:” type in the email address of the personal account.
- Select “Is owner” from the drop down box.
- Click Invite these people. This will send an email to the account listed above which will include a link to the sites current location under the ed domain.
Steps to take place in the personal Google account:
- Open Google account and Gmail to view the link to the account we just shared.
- This will take you to the Ed Domain log in page. At the bottom of the sign in section there is an option to “Sign in with a different account”. Enter the personal account log in and password here.
Note: To avoid all this, try opening the link in a different browser. - Once you are logged in, open the site and click the More Actions –> Manage Site options.
- Select the General option.
- In the middle of this page, there is an option to Copy this Site. Select this.
- Type in the site name and take note of the new URL which should read:
http://sites.google.com/site/(new site name here)
- Click the button to Copy Site.
To remove the school account as an owner of the site:
Go to More Actions –> Sharing & Permissions and remove the school account as an owner of the site.
Note: I didn’t do this as I still wanted to have access to this from my school account at this stage.
At any point the school site can now be deleted.
Instructions written by Heather Stafford, Technical Communications Instructor at E-Portfolio Apps. These have been edited by Al Ingham to match the current Google Apps layout in August 2015.
Conclusion
And that’s all there is to it. Easy ay!
I even went a step further, using my alingham.com domain to create a sub-domain for my eportfolio to sit in. Editing this is relatively straight forward by following this article.
It is also important to remember that, unless you want to go through all your evidence and black out student names, you should keep your eportfolio as ‘private’, and never publish the site as ‘public’. This means that any sub-domain you’ve created will simply point to the sites.google.com url, but the information will remain private to you and anyone that the site has been shared with.