About me Piece of Flair
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A well-crafted About Me page on your portfolio can give your readers a quick and clear image of who you are as a professional while also allowing you to show off your personal side, family, hobbies, or talents. |
Requirements
An About Me page on your portfolio presents an opportunity to introduce yourself to your audience; however, whereas the online business card Piece of Flair concentrates on being concise and to the point, this Piece of Flair lets you be a little more in-depth and relaxed. Consider the things you would like someone to know about you upon first meeting you. As we want this to be a high quality professional reflection, we suggest keeping things more career-related than personal (perhaps thirty pictures from your Caribbean cruise is not the best thing for this page), but certainly make this page reflect your whole self.
Consider several pictures, including:
- pictures of you
- pictures of your classroom, students, school
- pictures of your family
- pictures of you with your hobbies or other talents outside of school
In addition, we suggest adding content in addition to pictures. Consider adding the following in order to enhance and complete your page:
- a brief autobiography
- a list of your goals for your students
- a belief statement or personal mission statement
- quotes from others about you
Relationship between your Home Page and About Me Page
It’s your website, you can choose what where all this information about you should go on your website.
The “About Me” content you’ve just written can be contained on your home page, or it could be a different page altogether labeled something like “About Me,” or “Personal Bio”.
What you want to avoid, however, is having a home page that is very similar in content and style while to a separate “About Me” or “Bio” page you might make.
Considerations about personal privacy on the Web
The point of the About Me Piece of Flair is to make it so that you aren’t shrouded in mystery: It’s a chance to let us look “behind the scenes” and learn some about you and your family. At the same time, however, there are times where it may be worth keeping up some of the “shroud.” As a general rule, we discourage including highly personal information such as home addresses and phone numbers. Likewise, we hope that you’ll identify the people in your pictures, but you may feel more comfortable referring to “my spouse and children” rather than identifying everyone by name. Like many similar issues, this is ultimately up to you; we just want to make sure that you do reflect on it before coming to a decision!
Relationship to other Pieces of Flair
There are a few Pieces of Flair that offer a slightly different take on introducing yourself to the Web: an about.me page gives you a concise way to introduce yourself, a LinkedIn profile lets you introduce yourself in professional terms, and an About my Classroom page allows you to look “behind the scenes” of your classroom.
If this doesn’t sound like a good fit for your portfolio, please see other Pieces of Flair for ideas that might work better for you.
