I am mostly confused by this week's assignment. I disagree with the premise that thumb drives are bad and that the 'cloud' or any other online provider for saving work is far superior. In my life, I teach in a portable classroom that has experienced interruptions with the network, live in a home where my ISP has had issues, or visit a cabin frequently that has no network access at all. I am also confused about the need to set up a Dropbox account or something similar. Does not a Weebly better serve the purpose of ePortfolios better? Now it may not be the intent with a cloud service to share every piece of work, but I am of the opinion that I generally want to only share high quality work anyways as part of my portfolio.
Now, I don't want to be all negative about this week's presentation on ePortfolios. It is nice to be able to access files anywhere around the world from any device that can access the internet. Videos and other media files do take up lots of storage space on thumb drives, so the significant storage capabilities on the web are a nice bonus. And a portfolio in an electronic form online is probably going to be accessible, adjustable, and editable for quite awhile. Whereas any files from 20 years ago that were saved on floppy disks, ZIP disks, or hard disk drives of non-internet capable computers are not doing a whole lot for me.
Now, I don't want to be all negative about this week's presentation on ePortfolios. It is nice to be able to access files anywhere around the world from any device that can access the internet. Videos and other media files do take up lots of storage space on thumb drives, so the significant storage capabilities on the web are a nice bonus. And a portfolio in an electronic form online is probably going to be accessible, adjustable, and editable for quite awhile. Whereas any files from 20 years ago that were saved on floppy disks, ZIP disks, or hard disk drives of non-internet capable computers are not doing a whole lot for me.