Media use for freshmen adds up to 12 hours daily, poll finds

via Too Much Texting, Facebook Time May Lower College Women’s Grades – US News and World Report.

Children and young adults pay a huge opportunity cost for the time they spend online.

It takes 10,000 hours (of both deliberate practice and deliberate play) to become an expert in any important field (musician, athlete, reader, writer, mathematician, artist, scientist, engineer, physician, lawyer, etc.). That’s a little less than 3 hours of practice a day for 10 years. Subtract 12 hours a day for texting, stumbling upon, flickering, etc. and our children don’t stand a chance!

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via Media and Technology Resources for Educators | Common Sense Media.

In the Unit 1 for Grades 6-8

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Bullying and aggressive behavior by a sibling can be as damaging as bullying by a classmate, neighbor or other peer, finds a new study that links it to increased depression, anxiety and anger among victimized kids and teens.

via Bullying by siblings just as damaging, research finds.

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Click to Print PDF: Internet Student Code of Ethics 2013

Dear OTA Student:
Your personal Learning Journal is designed to help you create a record of your quality work (and your growth over a year) in the 8 OTA Core Learning Strands— Music, Science, Math, Seminar, English, Art, History, & Outdoor Ed.

The Categories available in the sidebar are set to match those 8 Strands and you should mark every post with one or more of those categories.

Why Create An Online Learning Journal?

• Blogs are very powerful content-management systems: which means they allow you to create a beautiful, multimedia record of a year’s worth of work and retrieve it instantly when you need it (by just clicking on the category of posts you want to see or by using the SEARCH Box to find all posts with the word “music” or “football” etc.)— but only if you use the Categories!
• Publishing your work on your Web Log ( = “Blog“) will often be the last step in earning a Passing Grade on a Project, or extra credit.
• When you are ready to apply to high school (choice programs like IB or an art magnet, or a private school) your Blog will be a Portfolio of all your best work that might just help you get in.
• You work hard to earn a passing grade on your OTA Projects, why throw them away? Now you can keep them, share them, go back and improve them as you learn more. If the work’s worth doing it’s worth keeping.

To Create Your Learning Journal You Will Have to Learn to:

• Scan, convert, and upload Text and Images (working with .doc, .pages, .pdf, .txt, .jpb, .png, inspiration, etc. files). Note: before you can upload word or pages documents you must convert them to pdfs or images.
• Create Slideshows and manage image databases.
• Edit and convert movies and music or sound files (working with .mov, .wmv, .qt, .mp3 etc. files), and
• Use the WordPress dashboard (content management system) to create, edit, categorize, and publish posts)

Things You Can Change On Your OTA Blog:

• The Header–from pre-selected photos or you can customize it with your own photography or artwork.
• The Picture of the Week–you add a new picture every week… from your own or classmate or teacher’s photos or scans or artwork.
• The Background image–from preselected photos or your own photography or artwork, or a 200 x 1000 pixel collage of other artwork (See “fair use” below)

Things You Can’t Do:

• Upload copyrighted images from the web (use your own photographs or artwork–or find public domain images)
• Upload violent or obscene photos, images, or text.
• Change the Theme Options. Why not? “Dark” makes your blog illegible; Content right ruins the left border of text, making it jagged and difficult to read; “No Sidebar” removes Categories and makes it impossible to find your content!

Does every post on your Blog have to be 100% your original work?

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Dear Parents or Guardians,

Please subscribe to the blog to follow along as your child completes projects in the 8 OTA Learning Strands!