We finished up our This I Believe projects this week and I am happy they are done. While I enjoyed this project very much, it stressed me out. With the end of musical season happening simultaneously, it was a lot for me to handle. Not to mention the fact that I am behind in at least 2 of my other classes as well. I’ve missed more school this year than I have I think any other year of my educational career. It’s not going to get any better either because track season is starting soon. I am a bit worried about how behind I am with the end of the trimester coming up, but I know I’ll finish everything; it just might require late nights and tears. Anyway, back to This I Believe projects. I was mostly happy with how my video turned out. The one that I uploaded to YouTube had the music too loud though, but since I used WeVideo, I couldn’t fix it. That stressed me out momentarily, but I got over it pretty quickly. I have small freak outs about things like that every now and then, but it always works out just fine. Here’s the link to my YouTube video! Next week we’re supposed to start our Pecha Kucha presentations. Yikes. I am not excited for this. I have read about 11 pages of my second book. Like I said, lots of late nights and tears. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I am not confident in my topic because I feel like I haven’t had enough time to really think it over and see how it relates back to both books. However, it is very interesting and I am a little excited to dive at least a little deeper into it.
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This week we focused mainly on making our This I Believe videos. The video making process is something I have a small amount of experience with, but I know that it can be long and testing of patience. I struggled early on this week when determining which video editor to use, and I ended up just deciding to use WeVideo. I also had issues when I tried to find music to put under my voice recording. I ended up just settling for music that I didn’t really like all that much, but I wanted to move on to video and images. I may go back and give it another look once I have my video “finished” if I have time. I found this article to be helpful when I was looking into how to tell a story well using video. I am a bit worried about being able to do this successfully, and I feel like I will have a challenge finishing my video in the time we have left, but I know that I can do it. The rubric I created focuses on what I believe to be my strengths. I think that as an actor, I can portray a lot of emotion using just my voice, and that is a BIG part of storytelling. At the beginning of the week we looked at the 7 elements of digital storytelling. I found the video we watched and the discussion we had afterwards to be very interesting and compelling. I believe that I can probably make a video that covers most if not all of these 7 elements. I am looking forward to watching everyone’s videos this week and learning more about my peers. This week was totally focused on the This I Believe project, which I find I really really awesome. I struggled A LOT writing my essay, and I’m not sure why. I found myself unwilling and unwanting to share parts of my story, and I think that’s odd. It’s a bit out of character for me to not want to tell a story. My speculations are that it’s a very personal story, it’s a very large part of who I am, and I’m generally a pretty private person. Add on top of that the fact that I am a perfectionist, and I guess it’s really not all that surprising after all. A lot of my work time in class was spent looking through other This I Believe essays and videos and such, and I found one by Colin Powell that I particularly like. It has nothing to do with my topic, but it’s very well written and I have similar views on what he talked about. At the beginning of the week we all chose a TED Talk to watch. I chose the one by JJ Abrams called “The Mystery Box.” I originally chose it only because it was by JJ Abrams, but I ended up really enjoying it. His concept of the whole ‘mystery box’ thing was very interesting. The idea that as an author you should keep things hidden is something that I do and I notice now that he pointed it out that lots of other authors do it too. Consciously allowing the reader to wonder what happens gives a sense of suspense and intrigue. There are some things in my essay that I left open to interpretation and will allow the reader to create their own version of my story. I think it’s pretty awesome that an author can leave things open ended, but still convey the same lessons and messages to the majority of their audience. Your online presence is being tracked. Constantly. Nothing you do online is truly private. I knew that was the case going into this project, but I was not aware of the full extent of it; EVERYTHING is tracked. I found the information we got this week to be very interesting, and I enjoyed learning about it. I even kind of liked answering the questions on the big document that everyone wrote on at the same time. I liked taking sides and asking questions. I didn’t like having to write a persuasive essay at the end of the week. I actually didn’t get to finish it yet. I was sick, and was not in class on Friday. I am pretty behind on a lot of things because I’ve missed quite a bit of school lately. I’m working on catching up though. The question of whether or not the government should be involved in protecting citizens from trackers seemed to be the central question this week. I don’t think that they should, one reason being funding. I found an article that was pretty interesting, but it’s not really related to this topic, but also it kind of is. Here is the link. I think there is a lot of opinion pieces on topics like this, but not a whole lot of cold hard fact. I’m reserving my judgement until further research. As I can’t really comment on an essay I have not yet written, I’m not sure what else to say. I struggled with the rough draft, and it was not very good at all. It takes me a while to figure out how to write things sometimes, but that’s okay because I usually figure it out in the end. I’m looking forward to starting the This I Believe project, and I hope it ends up being as cool as I’m imagining it to be. |
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April 2017
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