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?

No, you can upload your research, timelines, news articles, photos, etc. so long as you use the fair use practice (copy a small portion of the article, the link back to the original source. But for the most part your site is a tool that helps you complete the Learn–>Create–>Share learning path:

• Learn something new (skill or concept: a new song on the piano, how to write a sonnet, how to write a persuasive essay or speech, how to set a volleyball, how to solve a  new math problem, how to program a robot )
• Create something with that new skill or knowledge (a GarageBand recording, a poem, a speech, a winning team in sports, a book of real-world math problems, your own video game, etc.)
• Share your creation with the world (post it to your Blog)

In other words, what we’re interested in is what you learned and what you created, not in seeing a fan site for someone else’s work (band or a movie or an anime story), no matter how great it is! (but if you want to create one of those outside of school, the skills you learn here will help you do that. And when you leave OTA you can take the blog with you.)