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  1. @kdzebdi106

    Weekly Summary #6

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    This week brought me back to high school because I used to use my creativity to design pictures frequently. I also had a deeper understanding about the background and what I was doing with design. There was some inspirational assignment banks that I loved to create like the promotional campaign for a charity group. I…
  2. @tiffmooree

    Weekly Summary 2/22/19

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    This week, on the syllabus proved to be the least complicated, but was the hardest week yet for me. I pride myself on my time management, but that all went down the drain this week. I helped my boyfriend move from Monday to Wednesday, so this gave me two days to get all of my work done, while also having other assignments due for other classes. This meant that I had to get on my phone and complete assignments in the car, stress cry in between boxes, and flooding the new house with my tears. But after two days of constant work and Cherry Cokes, here I am to say that I have completed this week. Thank GOD! First up this week was the read and reflect, which I incorporated my questions of the week into. This was actually the last thing I did this week, and normally I do a majority of everything in order. This was something new for us, as we haven’t had to read an article (and go down the rabbit hole) to write a reflection. I quite liked this. I didn’t have as much time as I would’ve wanted to completely end up at the bottom of the rabbit hole, but I did enough to feel comfortable with the material. I enjoyed reading about design and how to convey them. It offered an insight of how to make my work for this class even better. I know now to think more about the message I am trying to get across to my audience and how to do so. Next was my designblitz. I am embarrassed to say that I got lucky with this one. I took a photography class in high school, and was able to find these elements easier than most, as they were already edited and downloaded to my laptop. In my photography class we processed film, learned how to edit photos, and captured images depicting the elements in photography. This also gave me a slight advantage, as I was already familiar with the work we would be doing this week. For my first photo, I chose to use a photo of flowers for color. I felt like this was the most appropriate. I had already edited the photo to better depict all of the colors of the plant and soil, and upped the contrast to further convey this. Overall, I am pleased with how well this photo fit the element. My next photo was rhythm. I thought this would be a difficult photo to find, but it was quite simple. I opted for a photo of a waterfall in Occoquan. In my post I address how nostalgic this photo is to me and how much it means to me because of this. I felt like water perfectly captured rhythm. In the photo, my shutter speed was timed to capture the water rushing down the rocks and splashing everywhere. In turn, this created a sense of rhythm. The next two photos were up for my own interpretation. I chose to use a photo of the clouds before it rained as dominance. This is due to the fact that in the photo, you don’t focus on anything other than the clouds because they are so captivating. This in turn, is the definition of dominance. I feel like normally, one wouldn’t choose to use a photo of clouds to depict this, but I felt like this was perfect. My last photo was proportion. I stated in my blog post that I felt like normally people would interpret this element in a different way. Normally, you would see people trying to lean the Tower of Pisa or falling off of a cliff, but I took a more original approach. I chose to use a scenic photo of land and water. The viewer can definitely make out how some aspects are closer than the others, some overlap, and there is a sense of foreground, middle ground, and background. I love my interpretation and I feel like it is very unique. Find my entire blog post here: Next was the daily creates. These always seem to make me engage in this class at least everyday and I really appreciate that. I feel like my commenting always ends up lower than I want it to be, so these allow me to stay keeping up with the class and my other peers. They truly are a breath of fresh air. I always really enjoy the assignment banks as well. However, this is where I ran into a slight disadvantage. In my photography class, we became familiar with photoshop. However, it came to my attention that I do not have photoshop at home. I turned to my sister as back up, and she had also cancelled her membership. She suggested using a few apps that she uses, and I began using one called Over for all of my assignment banks. I felt like this app wasn’t an adequate way to replace photoshop, but it was easy to use, offered many different editing techniques, and got the job done. I did three assignments of 4 stars each. I also noticed that with some mediums, it is harder to find certain star difficulties. For example, it was hard to find 5 star assignments with the photography assignments, but this week I had no trouble finding assignments. For my first assignment, I had to make a Valentines Day card. I opted to take the cheesy route, and I love how it turned out. I wanted to make it cute and appealing, capturing the true meaning of a pick up line. I state in my post that my boyfriend came to the rescue with the pick up line, and from there I created the photo. This was the first assignment I used the new app on, and it all went smoothly. I chose a cute picture to correlate to the joke, added text to display it, and added a few decorations to further make it appealing. My next assignment bank was to take a cartoon character and advertise a product with it. Pretty soon after I start this assignment, I felt like Ariel advertising a beach texturizing spray would be perfect. There is a lot of emphasis on her hair, and many people try to achieve her hair, so what better model to advertise a hair product than her. I simply chose a photo of her, added some text, and decorated it to further convey the message. My last assignment bank was to create a wallpaper for this class. I wanted to relate it to the theme, while also making it usable for anyone. I googled a photo of a secret agent, found the perfect photo, and added a filter to it. I chose to add a filter to the photo to better convey the contrast between the blacks and whites of the photo. Then I added some text, which I thought looked very relatable for the class, and added a simple decoration. I am very proud of how this assignment came out. So much so, it might be my favorite I’ve ever done. I really love how simple, but yet perfect it is. It adequately fits the class, and can be used by anyone. I feel like every time I write a weekly summary I address how I need to comment more. I feel like this point I am jinxing myself. So this week I’m not going to blatantly say that I need to, but I will imply it. Hopefully next week it will rise up to my standards. That is the only thing that I feel that I am lacking during this class. After three emotional breakdowns, two hours of further procrastination, and seven hours of sleep, I have never been so excited for a week to be over in this class. I enjoyed this week and what we focused on, but I have never lacked so horribly in time management. See you next week, where hopefully I don’t have time consuming obligations.
  3. @Katie73536604

    Weekly Assignment #5

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    Week 5! This week was filled with a ton of audio assignments, far from my favorite thing to do! But this is mostly because I have never messed with audio before. When I first saw that we were dealing with audio assignments this week I immediately panicked! Audio is my least favorite thing to do. I tried to download Audacity but unfortunately I do not have enough gig-a-bytes to download it. So I decided to stick to Garageband that was already downloaded to my laptop. This week consisted of a lot. I will start with the Daily creates Day 1: Youth Literature Day 2: Day 3: Overall these daily assignments weren’t too bad! My favorite would be the technology one mostly because I think the meme was funny. Moon Graffiti Moon Graffiti was interesting but overall a great way to get exposed to radio podcasts. The videos we watched before this was also a lot of help in pointing out the important features of the podcast. Radio Bumper I had a lot of fun creating this radio bumper mostly because I was able to feature my brother! He happened to be in the same room at the time and joined in on the bumper! (-: Tweet-A-Long This assignment was very engaging and I think that it should be used by other professors for specific assignments. It was awesome to be able to converse with other classmates about the podcast. Assignments Assignment 1 – 90 Second Story. This assignment was so fun! I wish I could have thought of a better idea but I am happy with what I came up with. I think this was also a good step in the direction of learning more about podcasting and radio shows by using different sounds to create a story. Assignment 2 – Distorted sounds. This assignment was interesting and I tried to keep the sound as simple as possible. This was the first assignment that I was able to play around with the editing setting on GarageBand. Assignment 3 – Another really fun assignment!This assignment was so fun! I wish I had more time to create something better, but overall I am happy with how it turned out. Radio Show Ideas For this final assignment of the week we were asked to come up with radio show ideas for our future assignments. I didn’t really know what would make a good radio show due to my lack of experience in radio shows, but I came up with a few ideas that might be pretty cool to do. Questions I think sounds tell a story in a really interesting way. Sounds bring a lot of emphasis to certain scenes of a story and really help with the imagination of how the story is being told. Time and place are able to be portrayed through sounds because they really help in the “painting a picture’ process of the story. The graffiti assignment was a really good example of how sounds help in portraying what was going on in the story. This Week Overall this week was another stressful one for me! I am happy to say that next week will be a little lighter. I recently started a new job and it has taken a huge chunk of my time. I really enjoy this class and want to be able to put more time into it, so I am happy that I will gain extra hours next week to dedicate to this class. I think I was a little frustrated at first with the audio assignments but after a while of playing around with Garageband, I have a good idea of how the app works. I can’t wait to start on our assignment for next week!
  4. @kdzebdi106

    Weekly Summary

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    This week was actually my favorite week so far as I really enjoyed doing the Audio Assignments. Audacity is a really easy to use software and I would recommend it to anyone that can’t afford expensive software’s like logic pro or don’t have a mac computer with garage band already installed. I also never heard…
  5. @tiffmooree

    Weekly Summary 2/15/18

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    This week was the hardest week by far. I usually am able to get a majority of my work done in the beginning of the week, so I never feel stressed. However, this week I was training for a new job and barely had the time to do any of the work for my classes. I also know nothing about audio and how to edit it, so this created a new challenge as I also had to learn how to do everything for this week. This created a crazy amount of stress for me throughout the week. Overall, I was able to get everything done before the due date, so this week was a success! The first thing on the list was to download and experiment with Audacity. This is an application I have never used before, so it was quite difficult. Downloading it was obviously easy, but getting to know a software I have never used before proved to be a problem. I tried getting to know it on my own, but this did not work. I tried watching youtube videos, but they didn’t help much either. I was having trouble getting everything into one fluid track, instead of overlapping each other. I eventually gave up after about an hour, and chose to face it head on when I had to do my assignments. I really enjoyed the videos we needed to watch. I thought Abumrad offered a great insight to what audio in storytelling really means. His examples and metaphors to help convey his points are very well thought out. It really offered some explanation to everything. It also made me focus more on the audio that I heard during this week to understand how it helps convey the story. Next was “Moon Graffiti.” This was a really amazing take on an audio story. I have recently been loving podcasts, so listening to this was the highlight of my week. I tend to lean towards listening to more crime based podcasts, so this was a nice twist. Everything in the podcast have some meaning behind it. Every audio component helped tell the story, which I don’t normally realize in the crime podcasts. Crime podcasts use facts and narrators to tell the stories, while this needed actual audio tracks and voices to help convey the story. It really did convey the message it was trying to. Creating a radio bumper was a really interesting idea. It was the first thing I did to experiment around with making my own audio. This caused some embarrassment for me, as I didn’t know what to say AND I hate hearing my voice played back. I thought about what I would normally hear on the radio to promote radio shows and went from there. I chose to keep it simple, add a secret agent track in the back, and add a slogan to pull it all together. My voice came off a little melodramatic because I had just woken up and it was honestly awkward to sit at my desk and create my own bumper. However, I think it turned out pretty good. The tweet along is what brought me great difficulty. I had just recently started training for my new job and didn’t have any spare time to get anything done. This, sadly, inhibited me from listening to the audio drama live. I was very nervous because of this, and emailed Professor Bond. He was very understanding and allowed me to simply listen to it on my own terms and write an analyzation on it. This eased my stress greatly and I listened to it during my commute to the university. I held true from my weekly summary last week to include the star ratings into my summaries for the assignment banks. This is one of the only aspect I was able to carry over, especially with how busy I was. For the mandatory assignment bank, we had to create a morning routine out of audio tracks. This was THE HARDEST thing for me this week. As earlier I stated that I gave up on figuring out Audacity after about an hour, as soon as I picked it up for this assignment I wanted to rip my hair out. This is where I started to experiment around again, and my boyfriend saw the anger in my eyes and decided to see if he could figure it out. I couldn’t figure out how to make everything into one track, it just kept overlapping all of the sounds. After five minutes of having my laptop, he found out you can cut the tracks and then just copy and paste them all into one track. After he handed me back my laptop it was go time and I finished this assignment no problem. The syllabus also stated to not make this a typical morning routine, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to bring in my character for one of the assignment banks. I made the morning routine focus around her as a spy. I felt like this jazzed up the assignment and made it an original morning routine. My first assignment bank assignment was to post a video of a memorable song, and then through audio explain why it has so much meaning to you. I thought about this topic for a while, and even went through music on my phone to help. I eventually thought of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse is a very nostalgic artist to me. She was my sisters favorite artist and I remember her having her CD in her car and popping it in whenever I got in. I talked about how one night, she picked me up late at night and we had a sleepover. The entire car ride from Woodbridge to Springfield we listened to old throwbacks. This was one of the songs that she played, and not only do I love this song because of the memories, but I also love this song because of the passion and meaning the song has behind it. Recently, when I rediscovered this song, it gave me goosebumps at how well this song is executed. Amy Winehouse was truly a legend. My second assignment was a celebrity speed date. I had to say all that I could to my favorite celebrity in the hopes that they would want another date with me. I took this as an opportunity to make my celebrity Lana Del Rey. I also interpreted the assignment into my own. I did not want to date Lana, but instead become friends with her and hangout. I also did specifically say exactly what I would say to her, I basically just said what I would actually do. I would want to have a conversation where I get to know her, and I ask questions about her and we can relate and joke around. I didn’t want to come off as a typical fan, but instead show her how special she is and focus the conversation around her personally. I feel like as a celebrity, she probably doesn’t get that very often. I picked Lana because she has gotten me through some tough times. Her music is very relaxing and beautiful (and sometimes a little raunchy). I used to listen to her with my friends also, so her music is very personal to me. My last assignment bank was to create a new sound on free sound. This was quite easy once I got the hang of it. I went through my videos to see which sounds I had, and came across one of my family singing my mom happy birthday. I feel like this video had a lot that normal happy birthdays lack. In this one, everyone is singing, and my mom is giggling and singing along. I felt like it added a personal touch to the entire track. Then I sent the video to my laptop, grabbed my phone, recorded a voice memo of it from my phone, sent the voice memo to my laptop, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. This may sound complicated, but I found it really worked for me. I did almost all of my assignments this way, and found it was the best way for me to do them. Daily Creates: Brainstorming radio show ideas was pretty simple. I noticed on a lot of my classmates blogs they did not relate it to the theme. In the syllabus it says to do so, so this offered a little bit of guidelines to create my ideas around. I wanted something that would be interesting to everyone, despite if they were enrolled in this class or not. I just grabbed my notebook, jotted down a few ideas, and made a post further explaining them. I’m actually really pleased with all of the ideas I came up with. Questions of the Week: How do sounds tell a story? Sounds tell a story by further enforcing the facts. One could say that they got into a brutal car crash, or they could have a clip of the car crash with the tires squealing and the giant boom. It creates a specific image in the viewers mind, that can still be manipulated. It offers a sort of second storytelling that gives even more detail to further depict the story. How do they convey a sense of time and place? Audio tracks can easily convey a sense of time and place. For example, we associate birds chirping in the morning and a rooster crowing morning sounds. If one adds these to their story, the listener will know that it is morning time. If there are car noises, one can assume that they are around a place surrounded by driving vehicles, like the highway. The storyteller just has to use commonly associated sounds to convey what time and place they want to to their audience. A sense of action? This fits the same theme. If there are sounds of punching and fighting, one can assume that there is a fast paced and high action scene taking place. If there are crickets chirping, one can assume nothing is going on. It also takes into account the things we associate sounds with. Commenting was quite another thing I fell short on. Last week I talked about how I needed to comment everyday, and I was going to strive to do that this week. I feel like I did comment more, but it was all packed together instead of spread out over the week. Next week my schedule will be better, so I will honestly try my hardest to comment every single day. I enjoyed doing the posts of the week. It forced me to go through as many posts from this week that I could to find the best. I noticed that one blog in particular got two out of the three of my submissions. I really enjoyed looking through everyones posts this week to find the best, it inspired me to step out of my comfort zone to achieve the things they did this week. I always look through the blogs every week to comment, but finding the best this week also pointed out the things that I didn’t like. I now know what I won’t be doing for next week, while also being inspired to achieve more. After an insanely stressful week, I am proud to say WEEK FIVE IS DONE!
  6. @faith_martino

    Week Four Summary

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    Visuals of Storytelling This week has been super exciting and filled with amazing adventures! I love how much I learned by reading through each article and by analyzing my own photography. Stories through the lens Photoblitz Oh man this was a fun assignment! I was very confused at first with how the best way was to complete it. I actually started it a few different nights, but got nervous before finally getting the courage. Fast Photography Weekly Assignments Daily Creates Question of the week There were so many amazing stories and photography! I was inspired be everyone’s hard work and creativity. I really appreciated the stories that were personal and reflected peoples lives. I tried extremely hard to tell a story through each photograph I took this week, whether for class or not.
  7. @Katie73536604

    Weekly Summary #4

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    Another week in the books! I was pretty excited about the topic being mostly about photography. I have always enjoyed taking pictures as a hobby and I was excited to learn more what others had to say about their experiences as well. For this week I started out by doing some daily creates: DC 3 – point A to B children’s book For this daily create we were asked to draw some sort of transportation from point A to point B in a unique way. I had fun with this one and I enjoyed looking at what others came up with!   DC 2 – combine celebrity to food For the second daily create I combined a celebrity and a food that was like a run-off of their name. I came up with Ashton Ketchup. Growing up I actually always called him that just as a joke, and I finally got to use that joke for the daily create!  DC 1 – what would you do with money For the last daily create we were told we hit it off really well with Bitcoin and asked what would be the first thing we buy…I said clothes! I am always complaining that I don’t have enough clothes so I thought this would be the perfect thing to buy first! Visual Assignments: For my first visual assignment (5-star) we were asked to take our favorite movie and retell the story in 10 GIFs or less. I had a lot of fun with this assignment. I think the toughest thing was finding the perfect GIFs to complete the story. For my second visual assignment (3.5 – star) we were asked to use a picture of the 1$ bill and draw or add something to it to make it unique. I immediately thought of putting a wig on George! I had fun with this assignment and trying different wigs out on George. For the third visual assignment ( 4 – star) we were asked to put two pictures together to create a message. I thought of many different things to do but ultimately went with a picture of the foresty lands and a picture of a city, to show how we are eliminating wildlife. Photo Reflection For this blog post it was nice to reflect on how photography has changed throughout my life and how I go about photography, and how the two readings describe photography as well. I think overall the readings hit some really great points and especially about how a narrative is seen in a picture. I say all the time that a picture is worth a thousand words and they truly are! Still Shot Story My favorite movie, again, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I promise I will switch it up eventually! For this blog post we were asked to choose a still shot of a movie related to our theme and then talk about the features of the cinematography. I thought this was an interesting idea to look at the cinematography and relate it back to the readings about photography. Photoblitzed Challenge I had a lot of fun with this assignment and I will definitely be using it in the future when I’m bored! I found it pretty simple and entertaining. Other’s inspired me this week through looking at their blog post, particularly their Photoblitz. I find it interesting what others perspectives are on photography. Overall this week was definitely a challenge for me. I have a new schedule and I was really not prepared for the amount of time this week’s assignments would take. I’m happy they are done and hopefully more prepared next week!
  8. @kdzebdi106

    Weekly Summary

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    This week was Hectic with a lot of tedious assignments being done in this class. The visual assignments were a way for to reflect on how I took pictures and maybe improve the way I take them in the future. I enjoyed the photoblitz assignment the most because I enhanced my creativity. I also enjoyed…
  9. @tiffmooree

    Weekly Summary 2/8/19

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    This week was fairly quite simple. I really enjoyed focusing on one medium for digital storytelling. The first couple of weeks there were a fair amount of assignments, but each week seems to become easier. I’m sure this is because slowly, I am getting the hang of this course and how it works. I originally thought I would like this class, but not to the extent that I have been. I thought this would offer learning, but with more enjoyable aspects. This course is the only class I am enrolled in that I actually enjoy the work for. I don’t mind doing work all week, because it allows me to express myself and be creative. I normally finish all of the work within in a few days because I dive into the assignments and never get the urge to procrastinate. First up this week was to think about the visuals of storytelling. This was pretty self explanatory. All I had to do was make a blog post and answer some simple questions regarding the topic. I state in the blog post that I took two years of photography in high school. This allowed me to develop film, learn the elements of art, use photoshop, and much more. Having a background in the learning and experience of photography made this week a whole lot easier. If I didn’t have any background, I would’ve been pretty set back and it would’ve been a little bit more difficult due to having to research a bit. Then we were assigned to find a number of different elements in movies or videos. Once again, I chose to do the movie S.A.L.T. I chose this movie due to the edits in cinematography. I knew that this movie holds many different elements. There is a critical change in how the movie is edited through her mission. During the beginning, it is very well lit and brings a sense of happiness through the lighting of the scenes. As she becomes more determined and emotional, the scenes tend to become darker and have more contrast. That is one of the reasons I chose this movie. Finding stills was actually difficult. It’s a lot easier to find gifs of movies, rather than stills of the movie. I was not expecting this. I eventually found all of the photos, but sometimes I had to interpret them into my own ways. I firmly believe that the photos portray the elements, but I have a fear that some people will disagree and not be able to see it. If I have learned anything from this class though, it’s that everything is up for your own interpretation, and that nothing is wrong. Next was the photoblitz. This was actually a really unique assignment. I intended on doing it the day before, but got caught up in the rest of the assignments and decided to do it the next day. However, by the time I got to it, it was already night time. This limited me to only photographing things in my own home. I feel like this is why it took me so little time to do the assignment. The maximum time was 20 minutes, and looking at the amount of photos we had to take, I thought I would be rushing around my house trying to get everything done in time. It only took me 8 minutes to complete it, and I wasn’t even rushing anymore. The photo that took the longest was the one with my cat, Tisha. This is because I hadn’t been home for a few days so as soon as I sat on the floor it was impossible to get her to stay still. I probably spent a few minutes doing this photo alone. Which, in retrospect, made the other photos take such little time. I think the thing that contributed the most to how short of a time it took me is that I planned all my pictures out. When I saw the list, I thought of the things in my house that I could relate to the tasks. Then it was just a matter of walking around and taking photos of each. Then it was my favorite part of the week, assignment banks!! I love assignment banks because it gives us the opportunity to pick our own assignments and the difficulties of them. This week I opted to do more difficult assignments, and they didn’t even seem to be that much of a challenge. I also decided this week to include the star difficulty into my blog post. I’ve been really enjoying to focus on one type of assignment bank as well. Last week was writing and this week was visual. This allows for some stress of not knowing which medium to pick, to be resolved. It also gives a sort of sense as to what we should be focusing on. The first assignment bank I chose to do was to show the love you have for your animal in an assignment bank. This assignment struck close to home because of one of my animals passing. I take so many photos of my two cats, and I knew it would be simple. I have never had to go through the loss of an animal, and while it been months, I still love to show off my boy. I honestly don’t think anyone can understand the impact an animal can have on your life. I may seem odd to be so attached to a cat, but he was with me through my entire life. I know some people find it hard to go through photos, but it brings me such happiness to see him. Once I found the assignment, I downloaded a collage app, found the photos I wanted in the collage, and then the app did the work for me! It made a collage that I simply just sent to my computer and inserted it into a blog post and wrote about my experience. My next assignment bank was where things became difficult. During the first few weeks I saw on someones blog that they did a barcode through hundreds of images. I thought I would try this out as well. I immediately ran into a wall once I downloaded the software and didn’t know where to go from there. I looked on other peoples blogs to see how they did it and downloaded a plug in on chrome. This plug in would downloaded hundreds of images from your computer in a few clicks, and I thought I was set. I filled up my computer with nearly 1000 images from the hospital scene of The Dark Knight. Once I downloaded the file into the barcode facilitator, nothing happened. It said it was processing it, but after 10 minutes the screen was still blank. So I deleted all of the images and softwares from my computer and went on the hunt for another 5 star assignment. I chose the only other 5 star assignment I could find, where I had to show I movie in GIFs. This assignment was a lot easier than the previous barcode assignment. All I had to do was search for the GIFs I wanted and them make captions to tell the story. I was actually quite pleased with how this assignment turned out. Things got sticky with my last assignment bank as well. I originally did an assignment where I had to match a quote with a picture and mesh the two into one photo. I had completed this and was about to embed it into a post when I realized…. I hadn’t related one of the assignments to my character. Yet again, I deleted everything and went back to the drawing board to find a new assignment. I found one where I had to make a photo unrecognizable. I was in bed at midnight, where I had to wake up at 6:50 the next morning to commute to biology lab, flailing my phone around to distort what I was taking a photo of. Then I sent this photo to my computer, put it into a blog post, and wrote about my experience with it. All I know is that I need to stop waiting until I’m tired and delusional to do assignment banks. Daily creates are always the most simple of assignments. They take little time and it’s always fun to look at everyone else’s interpretations of them. This week I fell back and didn’t get them done as early as I would’ve liked to. The first week we did them, I did this exact thing. Last week, I got them done as soon as I could and this is definitely the way to go. It’s so simple to take five minutes of out your day to do them, but since they are so minimal I always forget about them. For the rest of the semester I definitely need to get into the habit of doing them sooner rather than later. Commenting is also something I need to work on. I always comment on at least three blogs whenever I am working on this class. However, I need to start to do it every single day. During school, I am on my laptop almost every single day. So instead of commenting every time I am working on this class, I need to do it every time I am on my laptop. It also is such a simple task that I seem to overlook. There is room for improvement for the future, and it is definitely something I will be working on for next week. Questions of the Week: I always seem to take some sort of inspiration from peoples blogs. This week it was that nothing can ever be wrong. I saw someone do their own interpretation on an assignment, where in a normal class, not following the rules would kill the grade, but the way she did it was genius. It was the assignment where we had to find the elements in cinematography, but instead, she took time out of her day to take the photos herself. She took photos around her house and with her and her dog. I loved her spin on it, and I thought it made her post very original. I also looked for inspiration during my struggle with the barcode assignment. When I was stumped, I realized I should probably look at other peoples posts on how they did it. I went through three posts and followed one persons blog in order to obtain the photos I needed. Even though the barcode still didn’t work for me, it gave me the inspiration to try it again and always look at my classmates blogs when I run into trouble. I always try to make my blog posts as detailed as possible now too, to help anyone who is having trouble with assignments. If I can help someone like they did for me, then it’s a win win. There is nothing worse than to be stuck on an assignment you have put a lot of work into. I also try to comment as much as I can to show my classmates how I feel about their work. There are a lot of people in this class that are absolute geniuses. I need to get into commenting more, but I always try to. Whether that’s on blogs, or even twitter. Overall I think that inspiration comes significantly from our blogs, and they are absolutely vital to this course. And that’s a wrap for week four!!!!!
  10. @faith_martino

    Week Three Summary

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    This week was much more time consuming than the weeks before. Which is not surprising as we are getting farther into the semester. It definitely pushed my creative writing side more than it has ever been pushed. I really enjoyed learning more about myself and writing. Honestly, I am glad that this week is over! I did learn quite a lot about storytelling and am excited to incorporate into future assignments. I loved reading through everyone’s blogs and their stories. All were super interesting. I really appreciate the work that each of my classmates have put into their assignments. It is amazing that I am getting to know each of them all through digital communication. Digital Storytelling Research Character Dossier Weekly Assignments Daily Creates Question of the Week https://spring19ds106.slack.com/archives/CFS8EAZ6K/p1549075113002700
  11. @Katie73536604

    Weekly Summary #3

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    Are we there yet?? Week three was definitely a struggle. I am not sure if the frigid weather had something to do with my lack of motivation but something surely did! This week entailed a lot of writing, reading and producing. We had 3 daily creates, 10-stars worth of writing assignments, create our new character, and reflect on a reading and video. Daily Creates To start these are my 3 Daily Creates from this week. These Daily Creates were from Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Sunday: You can’t go wrong with… This first create was something you can’t go wrong with. I felt like a million things came to mind when I saw this Tweet, and finally narrowed it down to two. I thought well, you can’t go wrong with either, so why not post both? I took both of these pictures in Florida. One on the left was of a sunrise on St. Augustine Beach and the second was a picture flying somewhere over Florida during a sunset. Tuesday: Show us your best mask This second create was to show our best mask! The responses to this was pretty funny. The snorkeling photo I took last spring while snorkeling the Florida Keys was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this tweet. I believe other classmates posted pictures of snorkeling goggles as well- great minds think alike! Wednesday: How they did it before This third daily create was also fun! I actually ended up googling “how they did it before” and actually saw a few things I have never seen before! I came up with road map because when my parents used to drive me to soccer games, I was responsible for getting them there. This is literally what I looked like!! Now that my brother is in soccer, he simply brings up his phone and Siri gives my parents the directions. Oh how things have changed! Writing Assignments When I first saw that our assignment bank assignments would be coming out of the writing assignments section I almost panicked! I like to write, but not under pressure. So I was worried that these would be rushed given the crazy week I have had. But overall they weren’t too bad, I just wish I had more time! 3.5 stars: For this first assignment, we were asked to blog about our dream vacation. This blog was kind of fun actually! I decided that I wanted to take an extended vacation and travel around the world. It did take a while to compile all of the places I wanted to go, and towards the end they weren’t as in depth but I think it turned out pretty well. 2.5 stars : For this second assignment, we were asked to to time ourselves for 10 seconds and in those 10 seconds come up with a list of things we are thankful for. I found this fairly simple and kind of eye opening! In 10 seconds I identified what I was most thankful for and that felt good. I also added a quick picture of myself. 3 stars: For this third assignment, we were asked to take a poem and create a parody of it. This was my one assignment that tied in our theme! I had fun doing this poem though it was a bit difficult to do. I think the most difficult thing was to find a poem that could be turned into a secret agent theme. 1 star: For the final assignment, we had to create a haiku from one of our favorite fairy tales! This assignment was actually quite simple and I really enjoyed it! Character Dossier When I first read this assignment piece, I was very unsure of how I would tackle creating a character. I played around with many different ideas and introductions but this one was by far my favorite. I think the greatest struggle about this assignment was the time in which I had to create it. Mostly because this is possibly going to set up future stories. I struggled with how much should I reveal? How far should I take the opening scene? Who should Nadia be? Come from? Where is she going? Etc. Etc. I eventually settled with the story I posted mostly because of sake of time. Which is probably actually best because otherwise I might sit on this character development for a while! Nadia’s code name ends up being Golden Eagle which I thought was an awesome name. I came up with it by googling native animals/birds in the French Alps. I’m not sure how I came up with the name Nadia and John Smith, but something tells me that the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith had a huge help in the name. Which brings me to our story analysis. Story Analysis Mr. and Mrs. Smith is one of my favorite movies and I can’t believe I didn’t realize how much it relates to our secret agent theme! For my story analysis, I decided to re-watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith and analyze it. I enjoyed this assignment because not only was I able to re-watch one of my favorite movies, but I was also able to watch it in a new way! This time watching it, I really paid attention to the story-line shape. Something that was talked about heavily in the video we watched this week. I even drew my own version of the story-line of Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Slack Questions The final part of this weeks assignments was to answer some questions regarding blog titles. Here is my response: A good blog post title is engaging and easily catches the reader’s attention. I believe a good title for a blog post is not only engaging but also short and simple. I don’t mean simple as in bland, but I mean that the post is creative and simple to quickly read and understand. Good blog posts are creative and have a visual aspect to it. If you can paint a picture from just looking at the title, it’s likely a good title and will intrigue someone to find out more by reading the post! I think what’s different for writing for the web versus print is the creativity of the page or blog itself as well as the length of the writing. Online writing must be concise because people are constantly looking for the next best thing and will continue on if it takes longer than five minutes to read. Writing for the web also allows for visuals, which is something I enjoy most. I enjoyed having these questions to consider all week when making blog post titles, because it made me question if my title was engaging or catches the readers attention enough. Final Thoughts This week was certainly a crazy one! I think overall it turned out decent. I wish I had spent more time on the character dossier but I am still happy with it! I am happy the week is over, and the best thing about this course is that there are no two weeks alike. So, I can’t wait to see all the exciting new things we get to try out next week!
  12. @kdzebdi106

    Weekly Summary #3

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    I think I am finally getting used to this class by getting into the habit of blogging on a daily schedule. I find it slightly satisfying commenting on classmates post, tweeting the daily creates, using my imagination with the secret agent assignments. I’ve realized this class keeps me focused on my other classes as well…
  13. @tiffmooree

    Weekly Summary 2/1/19

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    This week seemed like it was draining, but it was all because I got all of the work done in a shorter amount of time. Finally being comfortable with the format and processes of this class, I am able to now get my work done as soon as possible. I do this because I equally enjoy it, and want to get some stress out of the way (is there anything wrong with that?). First, I read the The Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives for New Media chapter. This was enlightening and offered sort of a text for this class. It really gave some introspect to what we’re doing and offered supplementary learning regarding what digital storytelling really is. This helped my thought process regarding the material we had to do for this week. Then I watched the short video from Vonnegut on The Shape of Stories. This video was quite old, but relative. I enjoyed how he joked around while getting his point across. Sometimes learning videos can be agonizing, but his sense of humor made the short 4 minutes ACTUALLY feel short. Then I brought all of these ideas together in a Story Analysis. I chose to do Kingsmen (once again, as I wrote my Slack comment on this last week). I chose to do this movie because I am able to recall it the best and reflect on what made it a perfect candidate for the analysis. I was originally going to do S.A.L.T. but in order to do this I was going to rewatch the movie to refresh my memory. Let’s just say commuting to an 8 a.m. this morning got the best of me and my hysteria led me to take the easy way out (as I probably should not admit this). I have to give myself credit though, for doing all my work and not just calling watching a really good movie doing homework. I read some blog posts about how other people interpreted this assignment before doing it, and I enjoyed how one blog in particular used gifs from the movie in their post, so I used this idea for my post as well. I enjoyed diving deep into the story of this movie to decipher it’s true meaning and how it relates to spies. Next was the character dossier. I thought this would be more difficult than it was. I am not very creative, and that seems to be a weakness of mine. I can barely even draw a stick figure without being ridiculed. However, I always seem to amaze myself when it comes to writing something out. Obviously it’s not up to par with Shakespeare, but it’s pretty accurate for a college student who is trying really hard in a class. I thought the dossier cover page completed the assignment perfectly. It really tied everything together. I found the image of my character off of google, and I don’t think it could fit her and her beauty any better. Her story might be a little far fetched, but this is a storytelling class, so stories should be as crazy as one desires. I did have some friends start to shout out some ideas for her, but some of them were even too far fetched for my character. I asked what her favorite possession should be and I had someone scream back at me, “A SIGNED JOHN WALL JERSEY.” I guess that’s what I get on asking a group of men advise for a female character. The writing assignments were tedious but rewarding. Last week I did a couple haiku’s and I found a couple assignment banks with haiku’s that I did. Haiku’s are simple, but actually quite interesting. In my head, when I write them I have a specific meaning behind them, but since they’re so short, they have to be vague, and the reader can interpret these short poems into an array of different messages. I wrote a haiku about myself and my growth. I found this so pure and it boosted my self esteem. Sometimes you don’t realized how much you’ve grown until you reflect back on your past, which is exactly what I did to write my haiku. The next haiku was to write one about haikus’s. Some inception vibes there I might add. This one was longer, but more difficult. However, this was such a cool concept that I had to do it. It wasn’t too difficult once I got the ball rolling, and I think it turned out pretty decent. My third assignment bank was to make a bucket list. This assignment really caught my eye. I’m sure you can relate, but all the time I say something is on my bucket list, but never actually record it to make a complete list. I thought this assignment was going to be the easiest of them all, but it proved some difficulty. I thought my list would come flowing out as soon as I made the post, but this was not the case. I actually had to go onto Pinterest to get ideas to comprise the list, and after that, the justifications on why I chose those tasks was easy. The last daily create of the week was to write about living a day as someone else. This assignment made the ten star limit into a ten and a half star total overall. I used this as an opportunity to incorporate the spy theme and my character I made in the character dossier. It was incredible to make up a person from scratch, and then have to write an interesting story to live a day in their life. I opted for something a little more unusual. I chose to talk about her getting captured and her recollection of the events before. This was one of my favorite assignment banks I have done so far. I really enjoy the daily creates. They provide an incentive to check what’s going on with the class and contribute everyday. This is a great way to keep the class rolling all together and provide a form of constant communication. Last week in my weekly summary, I expressed how I should have started these sooner, then essentially I could pick if I wanted to do a daily create or not without being forced to due to the fact that I wouldn’t get the necessary amount. I ended up doing three in a row and completed them way earlier than I did last week. I have gotten a lot better at commenting over the past couple of weeks. Obviously it is a task to comment on posts everyday, but this is the concept I have improved the most on. I try to comment on at least three blogs every time I get on my computer through out the day. This is something that I still need to work on, and comment more, but there is nothing better than to see improvement in yourself in such a short span of time. Next was the Slack comment. I emailed Professor Bond to see if we should make a blog post about this and soon after he made a Slack page for these questions. I had already been thinking about them, so once I got onto Slack, it was super easy to express my opinions. Questions: What makes a good blog post title? A creative title? How does a title make you want to read the post?How is writing for the web different? How does it change the way we write? My Response: A good blog post title has to be a play on words or just blatantly catchy. For example, if I had a food blog post I could make the title, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” A creative title is an intro to your work. It makes the audience WANT to go onto your blog and dive into all of the posts. If you have something mundane, your audience will think that that is how you’ll write. If you show some life in your title, you’re more likely to get people to see your blog. This plays into how a title will make you read a post. It’s almost like a hook for an essay, you title is designed to give an overview of your topic while reeling readers in to reading into your blog. This also makes readers want to dive into your other posts. Writing on the web is different because there are no rules. You can write about whatever you want without consequences or someone telling you you can’t. It is also more convenient, as all you have to do is type to your hearts desire, when normally you would have to have some form of writing materials and a way to get your writing posted. It changes the way we write because now we can write however we want. We can write more laid back, or more proper, or even whenever we want. I believe having the web changed how we write for the better. And that is the end of week three! Overall, I am enjoying this class. It is allowing me to see that I can be creative after all! I greatly enjoy the amount of freedom we have to do our assignments, while also sticking to a syllabus that offers guidance. Each week, I tend to enjoy the class more and more. This weeks work I took into my own hands to get done as early as possible, and even though I pack all of my work into a few days, I enjoy it like that. I love how we have the opportunity to do this, and I look forward to the weeks to come!
  14. @Katie73536604

    Weekly Summary #2

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    Week Two – We got D(i)S106! This week we got to explore the Assignment Bank, make four Daily Creates, customize our blogs, comment on other classmate’s blogs, and answer the question of the week using Slack. I was actually really excited about this week’s assignments, mostly because I have been itching to try out the assignments in the Assignment Bank and to check out what the Daily Creates were all about! Assignment Bank: When taking a glance at the assignment bank, I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of options I had. Though very quickly I began to find assignments that I knew I could get creative with! I decided to spread the assignments out over the week to ensure each one had my full attention and creativity. One thing I noticed with doing these assignments is that although none of them were meant to take more than 10-15 minutes, I spent way longer just playing around with other ideas. For the first assignment, I chose to go with a Web Assignment. This assignment called for creating art with GoogleDraw in order to help Google learn and recognize doodling. I actually had a lot of fun with this assignment- it didn’t take very long but I spent a few extra minutes playing a few more rounds. Additionally, I created a video on how the game works using my iOS device. This assignment wasn’t very challenging but I was proud to have added another element by adding the video! For the second assignment, I chose to do a Visual Assignment. This assignment incorporates our secret agent theme. For this assignment I was tasked with finding a picture of any secret agent I would like. Next, I chose a quote from a similar secret agent, and finally, contributed the said quote to a third similar character. Although I enjoyed this assignment due to the creativity aspect, it wasn’t my favorite assignment. My final assignment of the week was my favorite! This Design Assignment allowed me to get really creative! I learned more about Adobe Photoshop too. Along with the first assignment, I did several versions of this assignment but went with my favorite, kayaking on Saturn’s rings. Daily Creates: I had a blast doing these Daily Creates! These are far by my favorite to do. They don’t take long and I like the creativity that goes along with them. I decided to post each of my daily creates into a blog post and described each one of them: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Here are the actual responses on Twitter: Monday: How will you celebrate MLK day? Tuesday: Explain something technical using furry animals. Wednesday: Find a song lyric describing a real place/thing and draw it. Thursday: Zoom in on nature! Again I really enjoyed these daily creates! I was not able to tie any of the creates to our secret agent theme, but I hope to be able to do so  next week. Question of the Week: This week’s question was about what we thought a good example of storytelling in the secret agent genre, here is what I posted in Slack: “I am definitely not well-rounded in the genre but I think a good example of storytelling in the secret agent theme would be the movie Spy Kids. I believe this is a good example mostly because I don’t have much to compare it to! By watching Spy Kids as a child, I gained a good understanding of the basics of what it means to be a secret agent such as spying, the high technology used, and action that takes place. The storyline is parents of two young kids were kidnapped, and after finding out their parents were previously secret agents, Juni and Carmen decide to take matters into their own hands. They become secret agents themselves and take on the mission to save their parents. A different example I could think of would be the show Game of Thrones. Although it is not explicitly a secret agent show, there tends to be a good amount of  espionage that goes on.” I find the secret agent theme very exciting but unfortunately I am not well-rounded in this genre. I have seen movies with spies in it but I haven’t seen any of the Bond movies, or quite frankly most of the movies people are referring to. Though I plan to gather some movies together on Netflix and watch them this weekend! Hopefully that will help me get more into the theme and coming up with creative ideas for the class. Customizing Blog: Another task for this week was to spend some time customizing our blogs (http://bubbl3s.com/). Although I think I spent most of the first week doing this, I still changed a few things! For one, I updated my blog name to “Spy Hard”. I actually got this name by generating some words into a blog generator. The generator used the title of the movie “Die Hard” and replaced it with Spy Hard. I have never seen the 1988 action movie but after watching the trailer I might have to! It looks as if it could pertain to our theme. Second, I adjusted the “skin” of my site, to a darker color rather than just white. I actually really like the change, it makes my header picture pop more. I actually took this header picture last summer at our local ice cream shop, Carl’s, in downtown Fredericksburg. It doesn’t necessarily pertain to our theme, but who knows, maybe it will appear in a future secret agent story! I also added a little secret agent girl. The last thing I did to customize my blog was to finally fix my blog so that people can comment on my posts. Speaking of commenting, this week we were also supposed to work on commenting on others’ work as part of the participation in this course. I found commenting on other’s posts/twitter and having others comment on my posts/tweets exciting! Seeing other people get excited about my work just gets me motivated to do more. The other great thing about participating is it can be extremely helpful. If I am unable to figure out how something works but one of my classmates did, I can simply ask or read how they did it, or vice versa. For example, this week someone posted on my post about the Photoshop I did for daily create and how they couldn’t get it up on their computer, but I was able to offer advice or suggestion to do it through their phone. I think the participation aspect is so important because we can all learn and create so much together! As far as this week goes, I think it went pretty well! I didn’t have too many frustrations and everything was super exciting to do. I can’t wait to watch some secret agent movies this weekend to help with creating ideas for our theme! P.S. I now realize that changing the skin of the blog makes it harder to see my links…I might have to change it back.
  15. @faith_martino

    Week Two Summary

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    This was such an exciting week! I learned quite a lot and was able to meet so many people by reading posts. Looking ahead at the coming weeks, I think I am most excited about Week 4: Photography, Week 6: Design and Week 9: Web storytelling. I really enjoyed customizing my blog site! At first I was not sure how I wanted it to look like. I went through quite a few themes before choosing Ashe! I was going to try and go with darker colors and an undercover theme, but I was not happy with my blog when I had that. As I am sure you all can tell by now that I love sunflowers.. they make me so happy! So I went with a sunny atheistic, mirroring my personality. I am still trying to figure out the menus. I would like to add a few for better organization. Weekly Assignments The three weekly assignments a chose were extremely fun to complete! They definitely pushed my knowledge of digital storytelling, which made me even more excited for the rest of the semester. I was able to explore Photoshop more than I ever had in my entire life, and I love it! Web Assignment: https://ds106.faithmartino.com/weekly-assignments/the-woman-i-am-working-to-be/ Visual Assignment: https://ds106.faithmartino.com/weekly-assignments/the-secret-to-my-stress/ Design Assignment: https://ds106.faithmartino.com/weekly-assignments/sunflower-from-my-past/ Daily Creates Participation I really enjoy looking at everyone’s work and reading my classmates blogs! It was interesting to try and keep up with this portion. I felt like I kept getting lost on the website’s main page, not remembering how far I had scrolled down or who’s blog I had looked at. Also, I was not sure the best way to put all of my comments in this blog post. Was I supposed to save all of them? Maybe next week I will create my summary post in the beginning of the week and put all the links in it as I comment. Also, do I need to add all my participation? Should I be adding my Twitter and Instagram comments as well? I ended up not adding any, so we will see how next week goes. Question of the Week https://spring19ds106.slack.com/archives/CFDNPLHT8/p1548386688007700

ds106 in[SPIRE]