Mahara 1.5 - 'theme changes'

The social eportfolio tool Mahara has released version 1.5 this month with lots of updates and new features. Myportfolio has used some of these features for a while so I'm pretty familiar with most of them.

The ability to customise your institution theme is a nice little feature where you can select colours and a logo/crest to upload. I was training some new users last year and saw @kieranphilip build a nice looking theme for his school in 3 minutes.
Along with theme customisation you can now also select the 'primary theme' which takes away the standard 3 boxes and introduces a nice UI for Primary school pupils.
Great for engaging younger users as they can click on the pictures to access different areas. (see picture)

Dropdown menus are a new feature that you can turn on in Mahara 1.5 that will help users visualise and find different areas when using Mahara.



 If you know enough about coding and design then you can still apply your own skin.

How Kiwi educators are using MyPortfolio

Above is a document that has been created by the Myportfolio community. Myportfolio is the NZ Mahara instance that is used by over 800 NZ schools and has over 40,000 users (September 2011). It has been shared as a public page in Myportfolio and also through Twitter. Anyone can add to the document and reading through the posts there are some varied ways that it is being used. Have a look through and add to it if you are a user...

MaharaDroid 1.7

Recently downloaded the MaharaDroid app for Android phone. I'm new to Android and wanted to try this for a while. As usual I tried to set it up with no help and after 10 minutes of working out where the token went I looked for some help. I knew Kristina was a fan of this and found some help in the MyPortfolio forums. The attached video (courtesy of Kristina) made it easy.

The app makes it easy to upload images and videos that you have taken on you phone. You can create folders to upload them to and also wait until you are in a wifi area to upload the artefact. The app also enables you to provide descriptions and tags from within the app which then follow it into your Mahara instance.

This allows students (and teachers!) to upload anything to Mahara that can be shared on their phone. It saves downloading to computers then uploading to Mahara, it makes the process simple. I'm a big fan already!