DP Guidelines
Your DP is a professionally styled representation of your work at HTHMA and beyond. Your DP will be viewed by teachers, advisors, internship mentors, college admissions officers and more.
All of the content on your DP should be yours. In the event that another student's work is shown, such as through a group project, that work must be thoroughly and appropriately cited.
Your Front page
The first page on your digital portfolio should introduce visitors to who you are in a thoughtful manner. Consider the following as a possible outline for a front page:
Your Name
HTH email (even better as a working link to email you. In html, just put "mailto:yourusername@hightechhigh.org")
Featured Project (see "How to display a project..." down below)
Featured Writing, or Literacy (see "How to showcase writing..." down below)
Numeracy, or Math & Science (see "How to display a project..." down below)
About Me (a good place for your resume and a personal statement)
Archive (this is the place for the file cabinet version of your DP—the one that is organized by grade level and subject matter).
To switch from the HTHMA server to Google Sites, your index page in your My DP folder should be blank, with the following code pasted into the HTML editor on DreamWeaver or whatever program you use to make your pages:
<html>
<head><title></title></head>
<body>
<script>setTimeout('javascript:window.location="https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/yoursitenamegoeshere/"',0);</script>
</body>
</html>
Important! Make sure that the following code copies perfectly. Sometimes copy/paste inserts weird characters. Double check your work. Also, make sure you paste this into the html editor, not the text editor.
Just replace "yoursitenamegoeshere" with whatever it is that you named your site. To keep things simple, use a simple, professional, easy-to-remember name. Once you do this for your index page, you are done and you can create a whole new DP on google sites.
How to make a drop cap with html code:
<div style="text-align:left"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0)"><span style="float:left;font-size:50px;line-height:35px;padding-top:3px;padding-right:3px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">DROPCAPTEXTHERE</span>
How to display a project on your DP
Project pages should display your work in it's appropriate context for parents, professionals, college admissions representatives, internship mentors, other students or teachers, etc. This means that you need to provide an intellectual frame for your work as well as a layout that flows logically. For most projects, you can use the following:
Project Title
Introduction and/or Project Description
One sentence that states the significance of this project
Work Samples with captions or descriptions
Epilogue and/or Reflection
Important: Think of how great multimedia already works. Although writers, filmakers, photographers often work under assignments, they don't necessarily make their final product look like an assignment. Instead, they consider how they audience naturally and intuitively flows through or with the work. You should do they same. Maybe that means you use subheadlines. Maybe it means that sometimes you include a prompt or text from an assignment. It probably means that you consider a DP page to be a form of an exhibition and a product that should stand on it's own. The audience should be able to navigate your work, even wothout you there to help, and still get lots of meaning from it.
How to showcase writing on your DP
Your digital portfolio should showcase writing for a variety of reasons. Here are just a few:
To show your thought processes, or how you understand and explain a complex topic, problem, etc.
To show your creativity.
To show your understanding of different genres, forms, styles or methods of written expression.
Assuming that your audience is primarily parents, professionals, college admissions representatives, internship mentors, other students or teachers, please know that they have some expectations and needs in order to fully appreciate your work.
They probably read news sites online, and expect a cohesive layout that is easy to understand.
They probably don't know everything about this class and would benefit from a brief project description, prompt or other guidance to understand what you wrote and why you wrote it.
They probably want to read brief articles online, but may prefer longer pieces to begin with an abstract or summary, and then move into the whole paper. Really long papers should have the option to download as a PDF.
You should display the work in a manner that is not easy to edit and does not make them download anything. That means a finished layout online or a PDF that opens online.
Important! Test everything on your DP on more than one computer and more than one browser. Just do it. You'll be happier in the end.