Reflecting on Assignments for Writing, Research, & Technology
When I signed up for Writing, Research, & Technology I was very nervous to take this course. I knew that this was one of the higher courses for the writing arts major and I wondered how I would do in it. All semester I worked hard on my assignments and projects and I believe that I have grown as a writer by actively engaging and participating in this class. For my reflection I have chosen to reflect on all of our class assignments to show my growth with each one.
Blogging
I have used blogs in other classes; however I did not enjoy them as much as I enjoyed blogging in this class. When we had to blog for this class, all of the blog assignments were very interesting to blog about and I enjoyed writing them, and getting comments back from the professor, and my peers. With having a personal blog in this class I was able to personalize it with the pictures that I wanted and was able to create the layout how I wanted as well. Using the site www.weebly.com was very interesting to use because it allowed for an organized way to keep our assignments. On my Weebly blog I was able to put each assignment on a new page tab for easy access and was able to customize each assignment page to go along with the assignment type. For each of my pages I chose to use bright colors and fun pictures to match my personality and allow for my audience to be attracted to my site as well.
My favorite blog entry that I wrote about was “Are You Hiding Something if You Don’t Have a Facebook?” was my favorite blog entry because I thought the topic was something that pertained to us as juniors in college, and the generation we are
all in with technology. When I was writing this blog entry, I had so many ideas I wanted to talk about because it is something that I believe strongly in. With blogging, it is important to have topics that you are interested in talking about so your entries come off strong. I believe that every blog entry that Professor Mangini gave us was so fun and interesting, which made for an awesome blogging experience in this class.
Overall, I did not find any challenges with the blogs at all. I thought the website was very easy to use and everything was pretty much laid out for you to access it. I felt like every blog entry that I wrote I was very proud of and it was something that I wanted to share with all my twitter followers as well, so I often tweeted the links to my blog entries. I also thought the blogs
were very successful because we got to see our classmates blog entries as well which allowed for us to gain a new insight on our peers and see different viewpoints on certain topics, rather than just having our own viewpoint.
This I Believe
When we were first assigned the “This I Believe” project I was unaware of what it was. I did a lot of research on the This I Believe website to get a better understanding of what this type of essay was. From my research, I gathered that these essays were based on something that you felt very strongly about or something that pertained to your life that you wanted to share with others.
When I first started this project it was a little bit of a challenge for me because I had so many ideas and could not narrow any of them down. I wrote a blog entry with three different ideas of how “I Believe in Pink” I thought this was a good start for my This I Believe because I work as a brand ambassador for Victoria’s Secret Pink, pink is my favorite color, and I feel
very strongly about the pink breast cancer ribbon because my grandmom had breast cancer. When I was coming up with all of these ideas I still did not know how to pick just one of those so I tried to find a way to tie them all together, and
that failed. Feeling very defeated in my apartment, I looked around my room and then my topic came to me. I chose to do “I Believe in Disney World” after seeing all of the pictures around my room of my most recent trip to Disney World with
my mom. Once I figured out a topic I was so excited to actually begin this project!
The This I Believe assignment was by far my favorite assignment of the semester. This was my favorite assignment because I was able to customize the “This I Believe”page on my Weebly with different pictures of myself and my mom at Disney World. I was also able to write an essay that was all about something that I feel very strongly about. When I was writing my essay everything came easy to me as I typed and reminisced on my Disney trip with my mom. Disney World is such a powerful, memory making place and it was so exciting to be able to write about it and share pictures with my classmates and professor. Along with writing the essay, I also got to use a new technology with my presentation, and that is using the voice memo to make an audio recording of myself reading my essay. At first, I really did not like the sound of having to make an audio recording of myself and have everyone listen to my voice, but over time I finally got the perfect voice recording and I was excited to share this with my class, which is how I chose to present my project. I think that using
the voice recording was a new and exciting way to engage in the “technology” portion of our class and I enjoyed it immensely.
When the rest of my class was presenting, I found it so enjoyable to hear everyone’s different ideas and it made for an interesting class because everyone had their own special touch for each project whether they used the Weebly slideshow, smile box, Prezi, voice audio, or simply read theirs; it was a great way to engage in everyone’s writing.
Advocacy Project
When I first heard that our advocacy project would be group work I was absolutely DREADING it. Usually, when I do group work I end up doing everything myself and it just is more stressful for me. However; with this advocacy project
I was pleasantly surprised with the collaborative efforts in my group. The main reason I feel as though this collaborative group work worked out so well is because we were able to choose our groups, and I am close with the people who I chose to work with. Both of my group mates are in my Early Childhood Education classes, so we all shared that one common thing, which lead us to what we wanted to advocate for. We chose to advocate for Public Preschool because this is something that we all feel very strongly about.
The first thing we had to do was find reliable sources on our topic to make our advocacy more reliable. Once we found our sources, we put them into an annotated bibliography where we had to summarize each source. Making an annotative bibliography was something that was very new for me, and I think that it is a great way to preview what you want to talk about and it allows for organization for your topic. Through research with our sources it allowed for us to use important and key concepts of funding for public preschool for our advocacy project.
After creating the annotated bibliography, we created the design plan which allowed for us to carefully lay out everything we wanted to cover when creating our advocacy project. When we were in the process of making our advocacy project we referred to this design plan many times to make sure that all of the requirements were met and we were appealing to our audience by also incorporating ethos, pathos, and logos.
One challenge I had with this project was creating the visual. At first we were very ambitious and decided that we were going to make a video and a flyer. Once we realized how much time we had to finish the project we knew that this was an unreachable goal and decided to do a flyer. Once we figured out our visual I believe that this was my biggest triumph within the project. Most of the visual I planned and I believe that the colors I used, with the facts with were advocating for, made our visual come to life and it turned out very well, better than I expected. When creating the visual it allowed me to use more
technology, which is something I usually struggle with, but when creating this I enjoyed making it and choosing the different colors and layout of the flyer.
With our advocacy topic, this was a real issue in our world today, so that made it more interesting for our audience. When we were presenting our class seemed very interested in what we were advocating for, and we even had some of our classmates join in on our discussion and ask questions. Overall, I really enjoyed working on the advocacy project, and believe that the collaborative work played a huge part in why I enjoyed it. It was awesome to see our different ideas come together to form one strong advocacy piece.
Social Media Investigation
The Social Media Investigation project was definitely the project that gave me the most challenges. At first, I had no idea what I wanted to talk about or where I even wanted to start looking for research candidates. I finally decided to use Facebook where I gathered statuses from adults on Facebook. From those statuses I was able to formulate my argument that adults are only on Facebook to brag about their children.
Once I knew my argument it was very hard for me to find a secondary source to back up my opinion, so I asked Professor Mangini for help. She was able to find me some sources which I was thankful for, because then I was ready to start writing my paper. Writing my paper wasn’t very hard for me because I knew the way I wanted to write it and I knew how I wanted to incorporate some of the statuses within my paper. I would consider my end product of my paper my triumph for this project because I think I ended with a good argumentative paper after many revisions. But, what is writing without revisions
anyway?
Blogging
I have used blogs in other classes; however I did not enjoy them as much as I enjoyed blogging in this class. When we had to blog for this class, all of the blog assignments were very interesting to blog about and I enjoyed writing them, and getting comments back from the professor, and my peers. With having a personal blog in this class I was able to personalize it with the pictures that I wanted and was able to create the layout how I wanted as well. Using the site www.weebly.com was very interesting to use because it allowed for an organized way to keep our assignments. On my Weebly blog I was able to put each assignment on a new page tab for easy access and was able to customize each assignment page to go along with the assignment type. For each of my pages I chose to use bright colors and fun pictures to match my personality and allow for my audience to be attracted to my site as well.
My favorite blog entry that I wrote about was “Are You Hiding Something if You Don’t Have a Facebook?” was my favorite blog entry because I thought the topic was something that pertained to us as juniors in college, and the generation we are
all in with technology. When I was writing this blog entry, I had so many ideas I wanted to talk about because it is something that I believe strongly in. With blogging, it is important to have topics that you are interested in talking about so your entries come off strong. I believe that every blog entry that Professor Mangini gave us was so fun and interesting, which made for an awesome blogging experience in this class.
Overall, I did not find any challenges with the blogs at all. I thought the website was very easy to use and everything was pretty much laid out for you to access it. I felt like every blog entry that I wrote I was very proud of and it was something that I wanted to share with all my twitter followers as well, so I often tweeted the links to my blog entries. I also thought the blogs
were very successful because we got to see our classmates blog entries as well which allowed for us to gain a new insight on our peers and see different viewpoints on certain topics, rather than just having our own viewpoint.
This I Believe
When we were first assigned the “This I Believe” project I was unaware of what it was. I did a lot of research on the This I Believe website to get a better understanding of what this type of essay was. From my research, I gathered that these essays were based on something that you felt very strongly about or something that pertained to your life that you wanted to share with others.
When I first started this project it was a little bit of a challenge for me because I had so many ideas and could not narrow any of them down. I wrote a blog entry with three different ideas of how “I Believe in Pink” I thought this was a good start for my This I Believe because I work as a brand ambassador for Victoria’s Secret Pink, pink is my favorite color, and I feel
very strongly about the pink breast cancer ribbon because my grandmom had breast cancer. When I was coming up with all of these ideas I still did not know how to pick just one of those so I tried to find a way to tie them all together, and
that failed. Feeling very defeated in my apartment, I looked around my room and then my topic came to me. I chose to do “I Believe in Disney World” after seeing all of the pictures around my room of my most recent trip to Disney World with
my mom. Once I figured out a topic I was so excited to actually begin this project!
The This I Believe assignment was by far my favorite assignment of the semester. This was my favorite assignment because I was able to customize the “This I Believe”page on my Weebly with different pictures of myself and my mom at Disney World. I was also able to write an essay that was all about something that I feel very strongly about. When I was writing my essay everything came easy to me as I typed and reminisced on my Disney trip with my mom. Disney World is such a powerful, memory making place and it was so exciting to be able to write about it and share pictures with my classmates and professor. Along with writing the essay, I also got to use a new technology with my presentation, and that is using the voice memo to make an audio recording of myself reading my essay. At first, I really did not like the sound of having to make an audio recording of myself and have everyone listen to my voice, but over time I finally got the perfect voice recording and I was excited to share this with my class, which is how I chose to present my project. I think that using
the voice recording was a new and exciting way to engage in the “technology” portion of our class and I enjoyed it immensely.
When the rest of my class was presenting, I found it so enjoyable to hear everyone’s different ideas and it made for an interesting class because everyone had their own special touch for each project whether they used the Weebly slideshow, smile box, Prezi, voice audio, or simply read theirs; it was a great way to engage in everyone’s writing.
Advocacy Project
When I first heard that our advocacy project would be group work I was absolutely DREADING it. Usually, when I do group work I end up doing everything myself and it just is more stressful for me. However; with this advocacy project
I was pleasantly surprised with the collaborative efforts in my group. The main reason I feel as though this collaborative group work worked out so well is because we were able to choose our groups, and I am close with the people who I chose to work with. Both of my group mates are in my Early Childhood Education classes, so we all shared that one common thing, which lead us to what we wanted to advocate for. We chose to advocate for Public Preschool because this is something that we all feel very strongly about.
The first thing we had to do was find reliable sources on our topic to make our advocacy more reliable. Once we found our sources, we put them into an annotated bibliography where we had to summarize each source. Making an annotative bibliography was something that was very new for me, and I think that it is a great way to preview what you want to talk about and it allows for organization for your topic. Through research with our sources it allowed for us to use important and key concepts of funding for public preschool for our advocacy project.
After creating the annotated bibliography, we created the design plan which allowed for us to carefully lay out everything we wanted to cover when creating our advocacy project. When we were in the process of making our advocacy project we referred to this design plan many times to make sure that all of the requirements were met and we were appealing to our audience by also incorporating ethos, pathos, and logos.
One challenge I had with this project was creating the visual. At first we were very ambitious and decided that we were going to make a video and a flyer. Once we realized how much time we had to finish the project we knew that this was an unreachable goal and decided to do a flyer. Once we figured out our visual I believe that this was my biggest triumph within the project. Most of the visual I planned and I believe that the colors I used, with the facts with were advocating for, made our visual come to life and it turned out very well, better than I expected. When creating the visual it allowed me to use more
technology, which is something I usually struggle with, but when creating this I enjoyed making it and choosing the different colors and layout of the flyer.
With our advocacy topic, this was a real issue in our world today, so that made it more interesting for our audience. When we were presenting our class seemed very interested in what we were advocating for, and we even had some of our classmates join in on our discussion and ask questions. Overall, I really enjoyed working on the advocacy project, and believe that the collaborative work played a huge part in why I enjoyed it. It was awesome to see our different ideas come together to form one strong advocacy piece.
Social Media Investigation
The Social Media Investigation project was definitely the project that gave me the most challenges. At first, I had no idea what I wanted to talk about or where I even wanted to start looking for research candidates. I finally decided to use Facebook where I gathered statuses from adults on Facebook. From those statuses I was able to formulate my argument that adults are only on Facebook to brag about their children.
Once I knew my argument it was very hard for me to find a secondary source to back up my opinion, so I asked Professor Mangini for help. She was able to find me some sources which I was thankful for, because then I was ready to start writing my paper. Writing my paper wasn’t very hard for me because I knew the way I wanted to write it and I knew how I wanted to incorporate some of the statuses within my paper. I would consider my end product of my paper my triumph for this project because I think I ended with a good argumentative paper after many revisions. But, what is writing without revisions
anyway?