This week was an easier week. We finished up our videos over the first few days, then proceeded to watch them over the next days. Honestly, I was expecting this week to be almost a break week. Watching a bunch of videos didn't seem like it would be that engaging or informative. I was proven wrong though, as I feel like a learned quite a bit from them. The first thing that I noticed was that my video wasn’t as bad as what I thought it was. After seeing movies and YouTube videos made by professionals, my video didn’t seem to be worth acknowledging. Watching everyone else’s videos helped me feel better about my work though, as no one else could compare to the skill of those who make videos for a living. Not only did it make me feel better about my video making skills though, but it helped me feel better about my work in the class in general. I often feel like my work has a lot of holes in it, and I don’t always get the best grade on my work. Sometimes it makes me feel like I shouldn’t even bother with the AP test because I can’t even do well without the pressure. Advice like this can help, but sometimes you need something beyond yourself. Watching the movies helped me to remember that everyone else is in the same position I’m in, so I felt more confident in my work. I also realized something about writing while watching the videos. I noticed that some of the videos had some really strong subjects to talk about, and other videos did a really good job of presenting what they had to say. It made me stop and think about this in all of the writing that we do. If we can take these two ideas and accomplish both, I feel like something really good will come out of it. We need that strong central idea to talk about. It’s the reason to write the piece, and the piece will fail without a good reason. It also needs to be presented in a way that captures its significance. The idea is worthless if no one can understand it. Both of these parts are equally important, and should be considered when writing.
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This was an off week for me, as I was sick for over half of it. It didn’t matter too much though, as most of the days were focused on actually making and editing our videos. This made it easier for me to do at home, since it’s all online. Before I could actually start the video though, I needed to revise my piece a little. I ended up changing the direction a little of the piece, and adding some more content. It felt good to revise my paper. I know from doing all the other papers, that my first draft never quite captures what I’m trying to say. I was a little worried because I didn’t know if I’d find a way to phrase what I wanted to say, but it all worked out. The next problem to fix was that I’ve never actually worked on a video before. Using the provided editing software, I knew that it wouldn’t be hard to get the video how I wanted. The issue was that I had no idea what I wanted. For example, I had no idea what kind of music to use as background. I used websites such as this one, but it’s hard to think up music that fits my theme. As I struggled to figure out how to make a decent video, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the first essay we did for this class. I didn’t really know how to structure an essay well there, just like with the video. As I started playing around with the video, I noticed that it took some time until I was able to really figure out how I wanted to do this. This reminded me of the pre-writes that I found myself doing before I wrote any of my previous essays. I’ve discovered that the whole video editing process is very similar to the writing process. Hopefully my writing skills will transfer over well into my video. This week, we started a new project: This I Believe. We started this by watching some videos about telling stories. Some were just of people telling the stories, and some were more on the theory of what storytelling can do and how it should be done. These were cool to watch and think about, but they were really just lead up into the actual assignment. Our goal for the project is to write a story about a belief that we have, then turn it into a video. This scared me at first. I felt self conscious about the idea of talking about myself, and I really didn’t like the idea of recording my voice. That started to fade away though, as I focused on the task at hand. Beliefs make up who we are, and it was really cool to start thinking about my own. It’s also different from most of the other projects that we’ve done, since those were about something we’ve read. This is the first project we’ve done about ourselves. This really breaks into a new part of your brain, as it is more personal, and less formal. I had a hard time coming up with ideas. I used websites like this to help me get closer, but they couldn’t quite get me all the way there. I eventually decided to write about my animals, since that was something safe yet meaningful. As I was writing it, ideas really started to break out. I think the problem was that I just didn’t feel comfortable about writing about myself, so I just didn’t come up with ideas. I think that this project is really good for learning to write in a different way. Having moved on from Shakespeare, we we’re able to shift focus to a new concept: forming an argument. We started by reading a few articles on internet tracking. For the first one, we read half of it and shared the information with someone who read the other side. I didn’t really care for this, as it felt like I was missing out on information because I didn’t get to read the other side. Instead of processing the information, I was trying to gather more. For the second article, we did group discussion. I really thought this one helped my learning, as it forced me to consider the parts of the article that other people selected. Left to my own devices, I would have only seen the part of the picture that was the easiest for me to see. Next, we moved on to a debate between the two arguments as to the ethics of tracking. This was probably what I learned the most from this week. Because someone else is trying to disprove your argument, it really shows you the holes in your argument. It also really taught me about how important it is to take time to do research on your subject. Reflecting on it, I can see that it also taught me a little about my argument style. I spent most of my argument focusing on stating facts, but not explaining them well. I’ve noticed that in my writing too, so that will be an area that I need to work on in the future. This website has a lot of good information about arguing, and I think it will help me extend better in the future. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2017
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