Journals

Introduction to journals

A journal on Mahara provides you with your own personal space to record and express ideas and thoughts. Whether you are a member of staff or a student, your journal is completely private - only you can see your journal entries until you decide you want to share them with someone. You don't have to share with anyone - you might keep your thoughts to yourself. However, it's likely that at some stage you will want to share those thoughts and get feedback on them from others. At that point, you can decide how much of your journal you want to share, and with who. If you make your journal completely public, which you can, then what you have is essentially a blog.

Where to find your journals

On Mahara, from the main menu, select Create and then select Journals.

Mahara Journals menu option highlighted.

You will now see your journals screen. You will see all your journals listed here. By default, you have one journal. You can, however, create as many journals as you like, and call them whatever you like!

To create a completely new journal, click on "Create journal".

Screenshot of the Mahara Journals page with a red arrow and highlighted box pointing to the “Create journal” button in the to

You can fill in the forms for the new journal you try to create. Then click "Save" at the bottom to save the creation.

New journal: Journal settings page in Mahara showing fields to enter a journal title, description, and tags. A Create journal

Creating an entry in a journal

1. From your journals screen, click on New entry for the journal you want to add the entry to.

Mahara Journal page highlighting the New entry button.

2. First give your journal entry a title. Now you can start to enter your journal entry using the built in text editor. You will see a number of editing icons. If you click on the downward chevron you will see the full range of editing options available to you in the editor. You can style the text in a variety of ways, embed images, add weblinks and more.

3. You can add tags to your journal entry, these tags are personal to you and can help you to organise your content or retrieve content when you have been using Mahara for a while. Type each tag followed by a comma, or select a tag you have already used by selecting 'show my tags'. These tags can be particularly useful if you want to share parts of your journal.

4. When you have finished, click on Save entry. Your journal post will look similar to the example below. You should get a notification that your journal entry was saved.

Mahara New Journal Entry form with fields for title, content, tags, attachments, and a Save entry button.

How to share your journal with others

Remember, you don't have to share your journal with anyone, but the chances are you'll want to, or you'll be asked to! If a journal entry is labelled Draft, only you can view it. You can then select the Publish button to publish this entry to your journal for others to see when it is included in a page.

Draft Mahara journal entry with the Publish button highlighted.

When you publish a journal, you do not automatically make it available to others or make it public on the internet. The journal or journal entry still needs to be put into a page that is then shared with others in order for them to see it.

If a journal entry is labelled Published, you can select the Unpublish button to revert it back to draft status.

Published Mahara journal entry with the Unpublish button highlighted.

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