Final reflection

My favorite project this semester is hard to choose! I really enjoyed making the 6 word memoirs, but I’m very proud of my animoto video’s end result. Making the six word memoirs was a nice way to start opening up and accepting the ways you can express yourself on the internet. It gave me an understanding of certain tools on the internet and allowed me to try something completely new.

                My least favorite assignment was probably the writing on a bucket list. I didn’t really like this because there are a lot off thins I would like to do before I die, but there is no way I can think of them all when I’m sitting in class and told to do so, it just doesn’t work!

                Friday reading classes were nice because, outside of this time, I never had time to sit down and read without being disturbed. The classroom always has such a nice atmosphere and it’s really easy to get lost in a story here.

                The Monday written reflections were also nice because it allowed me to look farther into the writing style of the author, express my views on certain events that happened and just get an overall better understanding of any book I happened to be reading at the time.

                I enjoyed the way blogging has really opened up the world of the internet, it’s nice being able to have a place where I can express anything I want to, post stories I’m working on, and enjoy what the internet has to offer to the fullest extent.

                Tweeting is something I haven’t enjoyed all that much. I liked writing the twitter fiction because I’d had a story on my mind that I wanted to work on and it really made me get it out. I didn’t like tweeting things though, I found the reading reflections were lacking a lot of depth and I would have liked to expand on my thoughts on everything I had read over the weekend or on the Friday. When It came to tweeting my bucket list, I just was so sick of twitter that I dropped the idea entirely. I will say that, out of twitter fiction, I got a really good idea of my IOP in English. I chose a bunch of characters from a book we had to read (The Plague) and I tweeted things from their perspective to create a better understanding of their character. If you were to search up Dr. Rieux on twitter, you may in fact come across this project!

                I liked keeping technology in the course because it is important to think about the things that can be found about you online, but I found that the course was still a little too based on technology for my taste; I would have liked to do more actual writing. I think I did more photo editing than anything else.

                As a reader I have learned that if I focus just a little more, I can pick things up in a story that I would have never been able to see without this course. As a writer I’ve learned different styles of writing and that it’s okay to let someone read something without you picking it apart. I’m not saying I will, just that it’s okay to do.

                I think, like I said earlier, that it would be nice to write a story, or have more mini lessons in class.

                It’s really been fun taking this course, and it’s certainly something that will help me for a while to come. 

Bucket list

I made a video incorporating 25 key points on my bucket list, attaching them to a picture each and a song. Check it out!
http://animoto.com/play/O0jhvLWgIDKJmbh5ofBWeQ
Some things are a little cut off, it's not like this in the original picture, but something happened when the video was being made, what can I say?

My Bucket list

I tried but no more ideas are coming to mind. If you have any ideas that you think should be on everyone's bucket list, or tips on ways to complete some of the more ambitious points, feel free to comment and let me know! 

1.       Go to an airport, bags packed, and buy a ticket for an immediate flight anywhere in the world.

2.       See the leaning tower of pisa before it falls

3.       Go bungee jumping

4.       Sing the national anthem at an important sports event

5.       See the Egyptian pyramids

6.       See the Mayan ruins

7.       Swim with sharks

8.       Change a life

9.       Climb a mountain

10.   See the entire city of new York

11.   Discover something incredible

12.   See Paris with my mom and sister

13.   Live in another country for a while

14.   Fall in love

15.   Fall out of love

16.   See a volcano

17.   Write a novel

18.   Publish a novel

19.   See a tornado

20.   See the northern lights

21.   Travel by boat

22.   Watch the sun set in every continent

23.   Fly a plane

24.   Learn to speak Latin

25.   Pass a year of education in another city

26.   Buy a star for a loved one

27.   Have a phrase written in the sky

28.   Earn a starring role in a play

29.   Get a 7 in IB

30.   Master an instrument

31.   Give a big inspirational speech

32.   Be mistaken for a celebrity

33.   See all 7 wonders of the world

34.   Raise a lot of money for a good cause

35.   Stand up in the middle of a quiet movie theater and yell something clever

36.   Visit L.A.

37.   Listen to the bells of Notre Dame ring

38.   Build a house

39.   Attend the Olympics

40.   Buy something from behind a glass cabinet

41.   Make a huge snow fort

42.   Learn to ballroom dance

43.   Spend a night in a haunted house

44.   Celebrate new year’s eve in time square

45.    Sleep under the stars

46.   Go up in a hot air balloon

47.   Go water skiing

48.   Go on a safari

49.   Scuba dive

50.   Start a food fight

51.   Visit England, meet distant family

52.   Set off fireworks

53.   Learn to salsa dance well, then go salsa dancing for an entire evening

54.   Go to the moon

55.   Hula dance in Hawaii

56. Learn to draw one thing well

57. Spend one Christmas without snow
58. Learn how to skate
59. Write a bucket list of a decent length

60. Be completely at ease
61. Learn to dance
62. Go parasailing 
63. Go on a pirate ship
64. Be confident enough to stand on my own
65. Fill an entire wall with memories
66. Allow myself to lose track of time
67. Fill an album with memories

Bucket list

I'm trying to write a bucket list and, with my goal of 100 things to do before I die, it's not going all that well. I have 57 items and I'm stumped. No matter how hard I search, even my goal of writing this list seems out of my reach! In writing a list like this, what does it say about you if you get stumped at only 57? Does this mean that I don't have as much ambition as I thought? That I'm already well rounded and have completed thing that would otherwise be on my list already? I'm not sure. None the less, this is something I need to complete. Wish me luck!!!

Reading Reflection #12

The Plague (end) so glad it's done. Had some nice peeks into the making of human nature. Doesn't hold attention well.

I'm done. I should also note that I only finished this book because I had to for class.

Reading Reflection #11

Here is my short reading reflection from twitter! Follow me if you wish @christinabaland

The plague (pg.174) Was cool, now all I think is "I get it. The death toll is going up. What else is new?" @cre8tiveHavoc #RR11 #boring

As a side note, I know this seems cruel, heartless, etc. but nothing is happening anymore. Only thing I'm getting out of this section of the book is filler and statistics. This seems like the type of book I'd enjoy only if I read the beginning, then flipped to the end! It's sad and all but it's so boring that I really don't care anymore. For the record, I'm not at all trying to brush off the severity of the plague, I'm just not enjoying the book.

Twitter fiction (again)

I wasn’t a huge fan of writing twitter fiction. I felt very restricted by the character limit and writing out each tweet got old pretty fast. I can see that it was a bad choice of mine to write an extended story like this because I had way too many tweets. I’m really proud of the way I wrapped up the story, but I’m also just glad that it’s done. I’m not sure what I think about actually putting my writing on twitter like that. It’s not as edited as I like my writing to be before people read it so I’m really iffy.

                I enjoyed reading twitter fiction a lot. I read some of a lot of people in the class’s tweets and overall, really enjoyed them! I wanted to say something but my comments, no matter how much I mean them, always read as if they’re half-hearted. I really loved seeing how everyone took on this task though! I also read Elliott Holt’s tweets. This was the story about a woman at a party on a roof who went over the edge. I liked this story so much because it got you thinking. I also was impressed by the way that she made twitter accounts for some of the party guests and tried to show the story as if you could understand the events of the evening only through the tweets of these three people. Only thing I wasn’t too much a fan of was the fact that some of the tweets didn’t seem real, and I found myself asking “Who cares?” to the occasional tweet. I look at twitter in a bit of a different light now. I’m thinking that it would be really cool to actually make a twitter account for one of my characters and let them come to life a bit more. It’s neat how even twitter can be used as a means of publishing your work, although I’m not sure if I’ll ever tweet a story again, it could happen, and it is something that I’m very glad to have tried.