My Website:
First things first, I like Weebly for the most part; when we first started using it I was pretty excited to have this website that allows you to create your own webpage without paying for it. Weebly offers a lot of tools and options for a personal or profession website. At the end of our semester Weebly changed a little bit and started denying access to certain tools unless you paid for the website. That was not expected but I overcame the challenge and found a new way to post videos. Then I had a problem with Youtube and their video limits. I am happy to say that I accomplished the tasks at hand even if I had to jump over a few barriers to achieve them.
The Weebly website I’ve made is mostly tailored towards this class. It’s more of a student website rather than a professional website. Now that I’ve had experience with creating a website and blogging I would like to find another free place to create a website when I’m teaching. I plan for it to be an online portfolio for future employers or students to get an understanding of my background and lifestyle. That website is going to be more professional at first, then once I get a job I’ll gear it toward more personal where my students and their parents can come and get to know me before they even meet me.
Needless to say technology in general played a huge part in this website and class. A person taking this class should have an open mind and be willing to try different types of technology. I never thought I would have created, edited and up loaded my own videos onto a website. It’s really interesting to see my technological growth that has expanded in this past semester. I’m using tools, websites and techniques I’ve never tried before. During the semester I bought a new smart phone; which came a little late during the Twitterive assignment but I still used the new phone to my best advantage. It came in handy for looking up information on the go while researching my other projects. Checking e-mail, calling and texting allowed me to get in touch with Bill for my oral history project and Sharon for our research project. I am consistently connected to and by technology now and I love it.
My Twitterive:
When the twitterive project was first explained in class, I was a little confused. Not much detail was given other then record your observations and take pictures of a place. Okay that’s the simple version of what we had to do, but either way you explain it there was no clear cut direction yet. I think a lot of us A type personalities went a little crazy and raised the red flags. “What do you mean just tweet thoughts and observations?” “How many tweets should we have?” “What should our tweets be about?” And the big one, “when is this due?” That part is actually funny now that I am not the panicked person I was in September. It was probably funnier for our professor to watch us squirm and freak out about a project without strict guidelines. After a few weeks of tweeting we finally calmed down and began to see the foundation of the twittervie project.
Here’s a piece of my blog about the Twitterive:
“For the past few weeks we have been allowed to use Twitter and Weebly to create a project called Twitterive. The Twitterive has allowed us to take the details we tweeted and put them into a multi modal point of view. The process began, at first we were encouraged just to tweet what we saw or thought. Pictures were a good way to get what ever point you wanted across to your audience. Then we started going to new or old places of interest and tweeting about our surrounding. I believe this is the turning point; where we became more focused on the subject at hand. Details became a major player in our tweets. Everything was being looked at more closely; the old tire swing wasn't just a tire swing but the symbol of your childhood. Tweeting these observations allowed us to use our technology we've all grown so found of and at the same time build this bond between place and technology. We went some where; pulled out our trusty cell phones and tweeted, this was the process.
Now the product is what is posted on our Weebly websites under Twitterive. This is where we took our findings and developed them into different types of writing. The product is an interesting combination of tweets.”
It was a new experience to be able to express our thoughts without having to type up a 5 page paper in MLA format. We were encouraged to write in different genres for this project; something many of us don’t do enough. Writing MLA papers get boring and tedious after a while; this project gave us a chance to break away from the norms. In the end I believe that this project set the pace and mentality that we should or are forced to have for the rest of the semester.
My Oral History Project:
Doing this oral history project was interesting to say the least; we had a choice of writing a creative non-fiction story or this oral history. I couldn’t make up my mind at first but after interviewing Bill I decided to take the chance and make this an oral history project, mostly because anything I could have come up with would not have done Bill’s words and expressions justice. I also took another chance by presenting this project as a video documentary; I don’t have a video camera so I just used my digital camera that allows me to record in 10 minutes segments. I came into Bill’s house with my camera in hand and he laughed at me, asking where my camcorder and stand was. Once we got past my lack of technology I had to deal with the awkwardness any regular person would feel while being interviewed. But once he got going, it made the whole process of interviewing much easier. Being fairly novice to interviewing, I learned a few things:
“While interviewing him (Bill), we were on the same level; he didn't know the kind of questions I was going to ask and I didn't know the kind of responses he was going to give me. I learned that as a interviewer you need a good theme or set of questions you have in mind or wrote down for you person of interest. I do not think I would have been able to achieve my results if I just placed my camera in front of Bill and asked him to start talking about whatever he wanted.”
I also learned that while interviewing someone and they say something moving, great, or truly inspiring that I should stick with that subject and try to get them to elaborate more on the story at hand.
After completing this project, I was proud of myself for conducting the interviews and editing the videos. Editing the videos took hours even though the interview itself was only 1 hour and 15 minutes. I understand now why people get paid to edit video. I have to say I’m glad I did this project the way I did. I learned a few new skills that I took with me on to the next project.
My (Our) Collaborative Research Project:
This was my favorite project of the semester. At first I wasn’t fond of it because I’m not one for group collaboration as it is. But, I am in college and college should be treated like a learning community so there is always going to be some kind of group work. Plus my chosen profession as a teacher will require me to collaborate with other teachers at some point in my career, so I better get used to it. My selected partner was Sharon and I must have lucked out because the topic of our project, all natural foods, is one of her passions. It was easy to pick out what we wanted to research and with a little bit of help from our professor we got a better focus on how and what to research.
At first Sharon suggested doing a video documentary which I said yes too but then thought about doing the MLA paper. Luckily Sharon pushed me to do this video because now that I think about it, I see that doing the formally paper is almost an easy way out. All we would have to do is find some sources on the internet and possibly go out and do personal research, which sounds pretty easy to me. When doing the video documentary we were forced to go out of our comfort zones and visits places and record our findings. Also filming gave us an excuse to do some candid interviews and a pretty detailed interview with Carla for 7th Heaven Farm. A paper could never describe what we learned from those interviews.
Once again I had the job of editing the hours of footage from our filming. I don’t think I’ve spent so much time on one project. I looked at this computer screen until my eyes hurt but at the end of this edit job I gained a new skill. The new skill was splitting the video at the exact point and only getting detail that I need for our project. There was a lot of extra footage that needed to be edited out of the video. It was hard because the video I took out had a lot of useful information but I had a time constraint and the information wasn’t always about our topic of natural food.
“From this project I've learned that I have more say in my food choice than I once thought. Even though I live at home and my mom buys most of the food I eat; I have the opportunity to go out and buy my own food. I like the all natural and organic food. it gives me a better connection to where my food has come from and what's in it. Even if its just little changes in my eating, I enjoy having more control over what I eat and buy.”
First things first, I like Weebly for the most part; when we first started using it I was pretty excited to have this website that allows you to create your own webpage without paying for it. Weebly offers a lot of tools and options for a personal or profession website. At the end of our semester Weebly changed a little bit and started denying access to certain tools unless you paid for the website. That was not expected but I overcame the challenge and found a new way to post videos. Then I had a problem with Youtube and their video limits. I am happy to say that I accomplished the tasks at hand even if I had to jump over a few barriers to achieve them.
The Weebly website I’ve made is mostly tailored towards this class. It’s more of a student website rather than a professional website. Now that I’ve had experience with creating a website and blogging I would like to find another free place to create a website when I’m teaching. I plan for it to be an online portfolio for future employers or students to get an understanding of my background and lifestyle. That website is going to be more professional at first, then once I get a job I’ll gear it toward more personal where my students and their parents can come and get to know me before they even meet me.
Needless to say technology in general played a huge part in this website and class. A person taking this class should have an open mind and be willing to try different types of technology. I never thought I would have created, edited and up loaded my own videos onto a website. It’s really interesting to see my technological growth that has expanded in this past semester. I’m using tools, websites and techniques I’ve never tried before. During the semester I bought a new smart phone; which came a little late during the Twitterive assignment but I still used the new phone to my best advantage. It came in handy for looking up information on the go while researching my other projects. Checking e-mail, calling and texting allowed me to get in touch with Bill for my oral history project and Sharon for our research project. I am consistently connected to and by technology now and I love it.
My Twitterive:
When the twitterive project was first explained in class, I was a little confused. Not much detail was given other then record your observations and take pictures of a place. Okay that’s the simple version of what we had to do, but either way you explain it there was no clear cut direction yet. I think a lot of us A type personalities went a little crazy and raised the red flags. “What do you mean just tweet thoughts and observations?” “How many tweets should we have?” “What should our tweets be about?” And the big one, “when is this due?” That part is actually funny now that I am not the panicked person I was in September. It was probably funnier for our professor to watch us squirm and freak out about a project without strict guidelines. After a few weeks of tweeting we finally calmed down and began to see the foundation of the twittervie project.
Here’s a piece of my blog about the Twitterive:
“For the past few weeks we have been allowed to use Twitter and Weebly to create a project called Twitterive. The Twitterive has allowed us to take the details we tweeted and put them into a multi modal point of view. The process began, at first we were encouraged just to tweet what we saw or thought. Pictures were a good way to get what ever point you wanted across to your audience. Then we started going to new or old places of interest and tweeting about our surrounding. I believe this is the turning point; where we became more focused on the subject at hand. Details became a major player in our tweets. Everything was being looked at more closely; the old tire swing wasn't just a tire swing but the symbol of your childhood. Tweeting these observations allowed us to use our technology we've all grown so found of and at the same time build this bond between place and technology. We went some where; pulled out our trusty cell phones and tweeted, this was the process.
Now the product is what is posted on our Weebly websites under Twitterive. This is where we took our findings and developed them into different types of writing. The product is an interesting combination of tweets.”
It was a new experience to be able to express our thoughts without having to type up a 5 page paper in MLA format. We were encouraged to write in different genres for this project; something many of us don’t do enough. Writing MLA papers get boring and tedious after a while; this project gave us a chance to break away from the norms. In the end I believe that this project set the pace and mentality that we should or are forced to have for the rest of the semester.
My Oral History Project:
Doing this oral history project was interesting to say the least; we had a choice of writing a creative non-fiction story or this oral history. I couldn’t make up my mind at first but after interviewing Bill I decided to take the chance and make this an oral history project, mostly because anything I could have come up with would not have done Bill’s words and expressions justice. I also took another chance by presenting this project as a video documentary; I don’t have a video camera so I just used my digital camera that allows me to record in 10 minutes segments. I came into Bill’s house with my camera in hand and he laughed at me, asking where my camcorder and stand was. Once we got past my lack of technology I had to deal with the awkwardness any regular person would feel while being interviewed. But once he got going, it made the whole process of interviewing much easier. Being fairly novice to interviewing, I learned a few things:
“While interviewing him (Bill), we were on the same level; he didn't know the kind of questions I was going to ask and I didn't know the kind of responses he was going to give me. I learned that as a interviewer you need a good theme or set of questions you have in mind or wrote down for you person of interest. I do not think I would have been able to achieve my results if I just placed my camera in front of Bill and asked him to start talking about whatever he wanted.”
I also learned that while interviewing someone and they say something moving, great, or truly inspiring that I should stick with that subject and try to get them to elaborate more on the story at hand.
After completing this project, I was proud of myself for conducting the interviews and editing the videos. Editing the videos took hours even though the interview itself was only 1 hour and 15 minutes. I understand now why people get paid to edit video. I have to say I’m glad I did this project the way I did. I learned a few new skills that I took with me on to the next project.
My (Our) Collaborative Research Project:
This was my favorite project of the semester. At first I wasn’t fond of it because I’m not one for group collaboration as it is. But, I am in college and college should be treated like a learning community so there is always going to be some kind of group work. Plus my chosen profession as a teacher will require me to collaborate with other teachers at some point in my career, so I better get used to it. My selected partner was Sharon and I must have lucked out because the topic of our project, all natural foods, is one of her passions. It was easy to pick out what we wanted to research and with a little bit of help from our professor we got a better focus on how and what to research.
At first Sharon suggested doing a video documentary which I said yes too but then thought about doing the MLA paper. Luckily Sharon pushed me to do this video because now that I think about it, I see that doing the formally paper is almost an easy way out. All we would have to do is find some sources on the internet and possibly go out and do personal research, which sounds pretty easy to me. When doing the video documentary we were forced to go out of our comfort zones and visits places and record our findings. Also filming gave us an excuse to do some candid interviews and a pretty detailed interview with Carla for 7th Heaven Farm. A paper could never describe what we learned from those interviews.
Once again I had the job of editing the hours of footage from our filming. I don’t think I’ve spent so much time on one project. I looked at this computer screen until my eyes hurt but at the end of this edit job I gained a new skill. The new skill was splitting the video at the exact point and only getting detail that I need for our project. There was a lot of extra footage that needed to be edited out of the video. It was hard because the video I took out had a lot of useful information but I had a time constraint and the information wasn’t always about our topic of natural food.
“From this project I've learned that I have more say in my food choice than I once thought. Even though I live at home and my mom buys most of the food I eat; I have the opportunity to go out and buy my own food. I like the all natural and organic food. it gives me a better connection to where my food has come from and what's in it. Even if its just little changes in my eating, I enjoy having more control over what I eat and buy.”
