This week in class we shared our This I Believe videos. Most of the videos shared were very personal, and about touchy subjects, and this allowed me to learn a lot about classmates. There was a large range of topics like traveling, being yourself, bullying, and failing. I even ended up learning stuff about my close friends. I’m glad that our classroom environment isn't very judgmental, as far as I can tell, or else I don't think people would have shared the stories and beliefs they did. I was afraid that most of the videos would be sad, and I wanted to avoid that, so I tried to make mine as uplifting as possible. I thought that my class had a lot of diverse themes/beliefs, which was cool. I think we have a really creative class because each video was so unique. I especially liked Kiara’s, even though she was kind of doing a different project, I really enjoyed it. In 2nd hour it seemed like a lot of people talked about their belief in their faith in some way or another, so it was kind of repetitive. However, even though many of their beliefs revolved around religion, everyone's videos were very different and interesting to watch. Although I didn't realize how religious our school was. Overall I think this is a pretty interesting and unique assignment. It makes you use writing and storytelling skills, which I guess could be important in the future. I mostly enjoyed creating the video for the project. My favorite part of my video is the end when I added a clip of Hillary Clinton making a comment about staying home and baking cookies. Elements of digital storytelling
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learn Basic editing skills in premiereOur This I Believe projects basically dominated the whole week in AP Lit. Last week we wrote our essays and recorded our voices, and this week we worked on our videos. Like I mentioned before, I’m doing my project on the belief that we should challenge stereotypes. Specifically, gender stereotypes. I find that they are everywhere in our culture and very annoying, so we should just ignore them.
Since I have experience in video editing, because of Digital Media, I decided to make my video in Premiere. My video making skills aren’t that great, but I already know how to work Premiere and it can make much more professional looking videos, which I like. I’m glad that Mr. S is allowing us to do our own thing this week to get what we need done. It’s helpful to be able to use AP Lit class time in Digital Media to be able to finish this project more efficiently. One downside of doing this project on Premiere is that I can’t work on it at home. Next week we will be sharing all our videos with the class. I’m nervous for others to see my video and hear my story, but I’m also excited to watch other peoples because I know they will all be so different and unique. I’m hoping that most people aren’t sad though, because sometimes I feel like major beliefs that we have come from bad or sad memories that we have, and I don’t want to leave the class sad. How to tell a good storyThis week in AP Lit we focused on our This I Believe Essays. On Monday we watched different Ted Talks about storytelling and then we took notes to share with the class. I found that watching these Ted Talks was a good way to start the project because it gave me some ideas for how to start telling my belief and different guidelines to follow. Like, don’t give the reader 4, but give them 2 + 2. I choose to watch “The Mystery Box” which was given by J.J. Abrams. I choose this one because I love Star Wars and he directed Episode 7, also I think he’s just a good director in general and I was wondering how he would talk about storytelling. I’m glad I watched his because he was actually funny and very intriguing. He said to leave the audience on edge with mystery and he told a story about his grandfather and a magic box to get his points across. I choose to write my essay on stereotypes because I think they’re the stupidest thing ever, and you should just be who you want. I’m passionate about being your own person, but finding a story to go along with it was difficult. My mom had to tell me some stories about my childhood in order for me to come up with an idea. I’m pretty excited to make the video for it though, I really like video editing. How to write an argumentative essayIn AP Lit this week we mostly focused on College Ready Writing Program assignments and activities. The activities we did in this program were centered around online tracking. We close read some articles, did a Save The Last Word activity, took partner notes, and had a small debate in class. All of these activities and assignments used group work, reading and writing skills, and helped formulate my own final opinion on online tracking. Then, in class, I wrote an argumentative essay on about why I am against any more government intervention with online tracking. I think the debate portion of the CRWP was the most fun and influential part of the program. I was part of the undecided group, so I got to ask the other two groups questions. This really helped me choose a side, which turned out to be the disagree side, because I saw how strong each team's arguments were and their personal opinions on the subject. I thought that the disagree with government intervention side had stronger points and it made more sense to my personal beliefs. After doing all this, writing the essay was very easy. This class has pushed me to think and write more quickly and because of this I am able to write a pretty good essay in very short amount of time. Mr. S also mentioned our new projected on storytelling where we are going to be writing This I Believe essays and then creating videos to go with them. I think this is a really unique project and I am eager to make the video portion of it. We watched a Ted Talk where a prisoner told a story that then developed into a belief he has. It was a really captivating speech and Mr. S showed us how the storytelling portion of his talk made us remember his whole speech more. This will be helpful when we go to write our This I Believe essays. |
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March 2017
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