Writing, Research and Technology Reflective Narrative
Writing: Some parts of this class proved to be more difficult than others for me. Being writing major, one would think that this would come easy. Unfortunately, writing has never been a simple task. I am good at coming up with idea’s, but getting them down on paper is hard. It was clear early on in the course that I was struggling with the blogs and readings. I found the readings to be extremely difficult to understand. I would get frustrated when I wrote a blog then would go to class and hear everyone explain the readings very different than how I interpreted them. Because I wasn’t fully retaining the information my blogs would lack substances. After receiving an email from Professor Mangini stating that my blogs were not up to par, I decided I needed to do something about it. My boyfriend always would read over all of my writing assignments to correct mistakes I miss. We decided we would read the excerpts out loud, then I would write the blog and he would read it over. It was very time consuming process, but I saw an improvement in my posts. I also would read my other classmate’s blogs to better understand the readings. I feel that over the semester my posts improved.
Projects:Knowing that my blogs were not the best I tried to make up for it in my projects.
Twitterive: I really enjoyed making my twitterive. It allowed me to show my creativity. At first for my twitterive I thought my place was being with my niece Dakota. I then realized that when I am with her I am different than I am with anyone else. I act like I am a child and I have no worries. I decided to make my twitterive around the idea that Dakota brings the child out in me. I didn’t want the viewers of my twitterive to just read how I feel when I am with Dakota, but I wanted them to feel like a child as well. Children don’t write too much, so a large amount of my twitterive is shown through pictures and videos. One video on my twitterive I felt could summarize my whole twitterive. It is called Play Date and it is basically all the things Dakota and I do when we are together. I also made my twitterives image very childlike by adding loads of color. I am very proud of my twitterive.
Oral History: My group and I did our oral history project on childhood obesity. Over the summer I took a nutrition class with Dr. Burhrer. She was very knowledgeable in nutrition, so I contacted her to see if she could do our interview. She said she would, but she knew nutritionists that also worked at Rowan and did her dissertation in obesity. Dr. Burhrer thought she would answer our questions better. We then contacted Dr. DiRosa and we set up a date, but a couple hours before the interview she had an emergency. In the end we interviewed a nutrition professor at Rowan Dr. Spencer. She gave us some very good answers to our questions. After completing the interview and watching it over I realized if I am ever to do an interview again, I need to speak louder. It is difficult to hear my soft voice in the recording.
Collaborative Research Project: My partners and I did research to be able to come to the conclusion on who is most responsible for the childhood obesity epidemic in America. We split the project up into three main categories parents, schools, and food companies. My partners and I each choose one of the three topics and found information on each topic. We then created three different web pages and explained how that group of people was responsible. Once we were done our individual parts we got together and shared all of our information. We discussed the three topics and decided that all three are obviously to blame, but it always comes back to the parents.
Working with other people can sometimes be very difficult. When I heard we were working in groups I was not thrilled. Once we started to work on the project I realized it wasn’t so bad. This time around I picked good partners that were as eager to do their part as I was. It was a very good collaboration. Many ideas that I hadn’t thought of they brought out.
Technology:I feel that I have always been very good with technology. For this course I used many different forms of technology. The most clear,
organized way to show all of them would be in a list by assignment.
Weebly- This semester was my first time using Weebly. I think the concept of Weebly is good, but when it comes down to using it there are a lot of problems. I released my frustrations in a blog post. Click here to view the post.
Twitterive:
- Paint- I used paint to create the picture of Dakota and I in the fairy land.
- Picnik.com- I used the website to edit many of my photos in my twitterive.
- Movie Maker- I had never used movie maker before this project, but I thought it was extremely easy to use.
- Twitter- I have used twitter in the past for a class, but it didn’t stick with me. I used it for school purposes only. I feel after following all my favorite celebrates I will most likely stay on twitter this time around.
- I also added borders and custom headings. I added the links and explained how I did it in my blog. Click here to view the blog.
- I used my iphone to take pictures that are on my twitter.
- My ipad to tape the video
- YouTube to upload the video
- Movie maker to edit my video
- Google- I used Google to find articles.
- Rowan Email- I contacted my group members through email
- iphone- I also contacted my group members through texting
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Many of the technologies I used were repeated in all the assignments.
I learned a lot about writing in this class. This class allowed me to see that research is not so black and white, but there are many different types.