I finally finished my This I Believe video this week, and it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I think I’ve always known this, but this week really taught me that I will accomplish whatever task I’m given, you just have to give me a deadline. Going into this project, we were told that we’d have about a week to finish it, which I thought wasn’t even close to enough time. This is a reoccurring theme for me. Almost every time I’m given a big project, I become instantly overwhelmed and question my ability to complete it in the time given, especially with any sort of quality. I stress, panic and procrastinate until the night or two before the deadline. This is when I become extremely focused and actually get my work done. I know this is a bad habit, and I need to break it before college, but so far it has worked. After finishing the video, I missed a day of school due to sickness. This was a bummer because I was excited to see everyone else’s beliefs, but I got to watch a few on Thursday when I came back, and I know I could always go on Youtube and see them if I wanted. Next week we will start working on our Pecha Kucha presentations. Right now I know what the main theme of my presentation will be, but I’m not quite sure what my guiding questions are or how I’m going to organize my thoughts. I’m extremely interested in my topic though, and both of books were so eye-opening, so it’ll be interesting to see how everything comes together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5vzOZ9vpHs
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This week we focused mainly on making our videos. I feel like I am below average when it comes to working with technology, so I was really worried when I learned we had to make a video. This is something that I’ve never done, but it turns out that it’s not difficult. Once we were given a brief overview of how to edit and work with the website, it turned out to be much easier than I imagined. In my opinion, this project is like a big puzzle. We are putting together many different pieces, so that they can all come together and make something awesome. It allows us to pull in many different forms of media as we use images, our voices and music. Many could argue that this project doesn’t really fit or make sense for this class, but I think it definitely does. Literature is about stories and we have been analyzing them all year; it makes sense that we should have the opportunity to share our story too. I missed Friday and was on vacation this weekend so I am feeling a little bit behind, but I’m sure I will be able to catch up and be ready for Tuesday. I am a perfectionist, so there have been many times when I have just forced myself to let little imperfections go, but overall I am really enjoy and learning from this project. I’m not saying I’m the next Steven Spielberg, but if I were to continue doing projects like these, I definitely could be. https://www.wevideo.com/academy I have been hearing about the ‘This I Believe’ project for the last few years, and have always wondered what I would say. Though we all have our beliefs and values, it’s harder than I thought to sit and write why we believe them. We watched multiple videos in the beginning of this week to learn tips on how to tell our stories, which I really enjoyed and found very helpful. I watched a video called “The Clues to a Great Story” and it had many good points. The biggest thing I took away from it was this idea of 2+2. Andrew Stanton explained that the best stories tell you enough information to come to a conclusion, without actually spelling it out for you. This made me think about all of my favorite books and stories, as they do this exact thing. Allowing a little bit of room for the audience to come to their own conclusions makes for different interpretations and takeaways for each person who hears the story. When thinking about my story, I hope to find the happy medium between details and inferences. My belief is something that was different than I imagined over the last few years, but I’m still happy and proud of it. The last part of of the week was spent writing our essay. Even though it is much shorter than most of our pieces, it seems harder to write because you want to do justice to your belief. Looking at the other videos people have made, and reading examples from the This I Believe website was very helpful. I’m not very good with technology and I’ve never made a video before but I’m excited to learn how as we continue this project next week. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/11562/ This week was all about learning how to make a claim and back it up using evidence from a text. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t really love this project. It felt like the basic persuasive essay stuff we did in middle school so I admit that I wasn’t trying my hardest when writing and researching for this piece. We used our illustrating, authorizing and extending idea and applied it to our claims which I guess made it a little more interesting, but overall it was kind of boring for me. While I didn’t love the fact that we were writing persuasive essays, I did enjoy learning about our topic. I knew that it was very easy to hack into private information using today’s technology. The news is always talking about celebrities and important people who were hacked, but it was scary to see it on such a personal level. Companies can track my information just because I logged into Amazon or searched something on Google. I guess I knew it had to be happening because I see the ads that are tailored to my interests, but it’s not very comforting to see just how much they know. Not only do they see the things I search and buy, but they can potentially know my ethnicity and preferred keystrokes. It was very eye open to research and understand why they track us, but also to see the statistics of what they do with the information. Though I didn’t love writing this research essay, there are definitely things I took away from it. I learned to make a claim as a group, how to add countering into my essays, and of course the danger of tracking. http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-do-advertisers-track-you-online-we-found-out/ |
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April 2017
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