Three Daily Creates:

1.  September 3, 2012: Take a photo showing the wide open space, the great outdoors.

I chose this picture because it represents a wide open space.  This makes me think of a wide open space because in this picture I was on a cruise as my high school graduation trip.  And we had a day at sea and all around you and the cruise ship is wide open space of the ocean.

2. September 5, 2012: Take a photograph of a spinning object, frozen motion or blurred.

This is a quater that I spun on my biology lab booklet.  I was spinning it on there because I was in the library and I thought that spinning it on the table would cause too much noise, because when you’re in a library you’re suppoed to be quiet.

3. September 7, 2012: Draw a tribute album cover by reimagining one of from your favorite band.

I’m not much of an artist so I drew this picture in Paint.  OneRepublic is one of my favorite bands, and this is a tribute to their first album Dreaming Out Loud.

Link to post about Creative Commons: http://aandrews93.com/wordpresswordpress/2012/09/05/creative-commons/

Embedded Digital Storytelling assignment: (gif):

Creating a gif was probably the most challenging thing I had to do this week.  In my blog post with the gif in it I included the process I went through.  For me it was a very long process that involved me downloading a lot of software, some of it I used while with other software I did not use.  But now that I have finished creating my first gif I feel like creating more gifs in the future will be a lot easier.

Reflection on Customizing Blog:

I thought that it was a lot of fun to customize my blog to be more personal to me.  I looked through and explored multiple themes but the theme I ended up with was BlueSky.  I picked this theme I love it when the weather is nice and sunny and the sky is blue.  In my room at home in Charlottesville I have my ceiling painted with blue sky.  I had the sky painted in my room ever since I was in elementary school.  The reason I wanted blue sky in my room was because there’s this frozen custard place called Kohr Borthers.  At Kohr Brothers there was a place to sit with a mini carousel in the middle.  But the ceiling in the room was sky, and when I saw that I was like loved it and told my parents that I really wanted to have a sky ceiling in my room.  And that’s the story behind choosing my theme.  In BlueSky theme I also like the font of the titles.  It is also is very simple in customizing what appears on your menu bars.  Customizing my blog was fairly easy for me (much easier than making a gif), I watched a lot of the tutorials online about blog themes which was really helpful.  I defintely feel that my blog is a reflection of me because I created it.  Some other things that I’d like to do with my blog is to post other non class related thoughts I have and anything else in general that I feel like.

Reflection of Week #2 and Bootcamp in general:

I have really been enjoying my experience in ds106.  I’ve learned how to do so many things about creating a blog during these past 2 weeks.  I’ve really been enjoying the daily create assignments.  They are fun things to do and they take very little time which I like.  I think that bootcamp was  good idea because it really taught me how to use wordpress and working with themes etc.  I feel like if I just started in this course without the bootcamp two weeks I’d be really lost.  I also like in this course being able to tag things with whatever I want in addition to the required tags for assignments.  I also enjoyed making my blog more personal this week.  And installing the plugins to reduce spammers was also great.  I also installed the plugin twitter tools, slickr flickr, flickr photo post and jet pack.   The most difficult thing for me this week was creating a gif.  Like I said in my post earlier it just took me a while to research and watch tutorials on how to make gifs.  I was having trouble grasping the concepts of downloading a youtube video and editing it to create a short gif.  But all the tutorials I have watched have been really helpful and informative.  One thing this week that I’m not quite sure about doing is when I paste URL links to other things such as in my gif post, it shows the whole URL while I’ve noticed in other blogs that they have one key word that you can click on and link to the page?  Other than that I have been able to figure out how to do everything else.  I feel that over the past two weeks I am now able to know what I am doing for my blog.  I am really looking forward to the weeks to come to see what will come next after bootcamp.