As a student in DS106, we were required to do a final project which is worth twenty percent of our grade. DS106 is a class based on using digital tools so that ordinary people can tell their own real-life stories. Our final project assignment was to create an assignment that incorporates tools that we have learned this year, and tell a story through the use of those tools.

Throughout the year we were required to manage and create our own personal sights. I chose to create a new sight for my final project. I chose to create a new sight because I believe managing my own personal sight is what I enjoyed the most this year. Not only did it allow me to interact with others and become familiar with social media and html, but I also believe it is very useful for my career in the business analysis and technology field.

The new sight I created is called Diabetic Fitness, A story of how fitness changed my life. Diabetic Fitness tells a major story of a individual who has been diagnosed with diabetes, and became fit and healthy through exercise. My sight has many features. I’ve included polls, calculators that calculate your body mass index and body fat, a introduction video, a slide show of images from my Flickr set created for this sight, a interactive quiz, and a question and answer page. I’ve also created a Facebook page and twitter for Diabetic Fitness. I downloaded plugins through WordPress which allowed me to create quiz’s and polls, a Facebook like button, a twitter like bottom, and the calculators.

In order to create the introduction video for my sight I used iMovie. I movie is a very simple video editing software that comes with Apple Mac laptops and computers. I included a introduction movie in my sight because I wanted to incorporate what I’ve learned through the year in DS106. Although I obviously showed how I learned to manage and create a web sight, I also wanted to show what i’ve learned regarding video and photo editing. I incorporated that i’ve learned photo editing by making my own website picture, or in other words the picture for Diabetic Fitness. The picture that I created isn’t only the focal point of my sight, but it’s also the picture on the Facebook page and twitter account that i’ve created. I created the Diabetic Fitness picture using gimp. Gimp is free photo editing software that is easily downloaded off of the internet. Since my sight is about fitness and diabetes, I wanted to include a picture of some sort of fitness, and a needle representing insulin injections that diabetics often have to take. I searched google and found a perfect fitness picture to use. I chose this picture because it was neat and simple and I knew I could easily edit it into my picture. I also search google and found the perfect needle picture to use, however I can’t seem to trace where I got it from. I chose this specific needle picture because it shows a hand getting ready to give a injection. Representing individuals giving them selves insulin injections.

The sight that I created tells a story of how fitness effects those diagnosed with diabetes. I made up a story of a man Chris who has been diagnosed with diabetes when he was sixteen years old. My sight is in story form, so you have to go page by page in order to know the full story of Chris, and obtain information about diabetes. My sight tell the story of Chris by him quoting his experience with diabetes. My sight starts off by Chris introducing himself as a college student, who has recently received his certificate to be a personal trainer. As you read on you learn that Chris wasn’t always fit and muscular, Chris was fat and overweight and at the age of sixteen he was diagnosed with type two diabetes. I made Chris tell his story from his first doctor appointment at the age of sixteen when his doctor urged him to get tested for diabetes, to his test results, his treatments, his start to exercising, and at the end of the story I finally include what is the sight about and why he made it.

I wanted to make my sight about diabetes and fitness because fitness is my main hobby, and I know a bunch of people who have been diagnosed with diabetes and I’ve heard all their stories of how fitness changed their lives as a diabetic. It was very important for me to do my final project on fitness, but it wasn’t until recently that I came up with the idea for doing it on the connection between fitness and diabetes. It was really important to me that I created a story that didn’t just tell the story of someones experience with diabetes, but also gave valuable important information. I made sure I included information such as what is diabetes, to it’s treatments and symptoms. I also wanted to include how you exercise properly when your a diabetic.

Diabetic Fitness is a story simply because I’m just just placing out facts about diabetes and fitness, but I’m using a made up story of someone else to make a larger lasting impact on the reader, but also allows the reader to get valuable information. Diabetic Fitness was actually my second idea for doing my final project. I began working on my first idea which was to tell the story of how fitness has changed through the years. The truth is, it hasn’t. The exercise equipment may have changed but exercises haven’t and steroids are still being used my many. After noticing that I couldn’t tell a story, the thought of Diabetic Fitness came across my mind. The second I thought about it I knew it would work, and I believe it did.