PSA Feedback

This past week in DigCit we have been showing our PSA projects to our school and hoping to get them out and see some real feedback. We are showing one a day and hoping to get people to watch them and learn something rather than just forgetting what we show them and saying, "Oh, that won't happen to me". My groups main goal was to have people be careful about what they post online as it can and will harm you in the future when you submit college and job applications. As people are paying attention to more social media when considering who to hire or accept, it is important to be cautious regarding what we are posting online. Most of the time when posting things, I personally never think about possible consequences that could potentially arrive in the future just because of one post. 

Overall, I have received a lot of positive feedback from teachers and other students at our school about my PSA. I am glad that some students have come to the realization that they need to be careful on what they post online because after all the hard work we put into getting good grades and being accepted into a great school, nobody wants that to be ruined because of a meaningless post on Twitter. Hopefully, more students have learned something from my PSA than just the few that have said something to me. I know how hard it can be to keep up with everything going on in 7 classes at once and I wouldn't want anyone to have their dream college deny them, not because of grades, but because of a dumb post online.

PSA Project

This past week or two we have been working in groups on our PSA projects in order to spread awareness about our given topics. We worked in groups of 3-4 and my group received a topic concerning digital footprints and why you should be cautious of what you post. Our group focused on the fact that everything you post online will always be there and will always be able to be seen by anyone who wants to. Everything you post can and will effect your future so we tried to drill that into the head of our viewers so that people do not ruin their future because of a post that at the time seemed harmless. In DigCit, we often speak of how what we post online will effect our college applications and job applications. So, this is a topic that we are somewhat familiar with and could easily depict what would happen if you are not cautious. Some of the phrases we used might be seen as a little dramatic or severe (like the one below), but we did this on purpose so that people watching would not shrug our message off and say, "Oh, that won't be me". 

Because it always happens to someone and if you are posting things that could put your future in danger, you are putting yourself in danger and you could potentially be the next victim.

Spreading Word of The Knightly News

Just yesterday, in DigCit, we held a Google Hangout call with a professional freelance artist, Kevin Beaty. He attended our school before the high school was created and we were just a middle school, however our art teacher taught him in high school which is where the connection was made. The great thing about what he does is that this class is mainly describing what he does for a living. He gave us certain advice on how we can get out into the public and spread awareness for our projects. Mainly my goal has just been in person at school and on social media. But now, after talking with a professional, I realize that doing more in person would also be just as helpful as social media. Personally, I feel like social media would be the best for my project because then I could just add the link to my videos in any post that I make about The Knightly News. 

Whilst talking to Kevin, he showed us an informational booklet that he used to promote his work and to recieve new jobs. I think possibly making, almost a commercial for the Knightly News would be helpful in getting the word out all around the school. Also, I think that this way people will know when to expect the next episode and hopefully the will be looking forwards to it. Like I have said earlier, I want this project to be as informative as possible, but in order to make it interesting and have students look forward to watching it, there is going to have to be a comedic element in the videos. 

Public Proposal

Just last night my entire class of DigCit and I held our Passion Project Proposals in our school right before the school play. As I have mentioned multiple times my project is a video series entitled The Knightly News, it was created as a visual alternative to the announcements once every two weeks so that students may be more involved with what is going on around our school. In my opinion the proposal went very well for everyone, I think we were all a little nervous at first but once it got into the swing of things it was really smooth and nothing went wrong that I could think of. This was considered our midterm for this class so it was important that we prepared visually and what we were going to say when groups of people came up to us and were curious about what we are working on. Here is a picture of the visual that I created. 

Overall, I think that the proposal was a huge success and it was great for our whole class to get our projects out into the public community and not just within our four walls. 

Minor Setbacks

The Knightly News will hopefully have its first episode released soon. Unfortunately, the recording has been delayed as multiple members are involved in the school play and cannot make it after school until after the play is done. So, the episode will likely be delayed but hopefully not by more than a week. Other than that one issue everything else is going as planned. We have gathered enough members that can hopefully fill the entire script. A rough draft of the script has been written, hopefully after the Twitter chat in December we will be able to adjust it accordingly to best suit other students. We have also been able to successfuly gather multiple cameras, tripods, audio equipment, and a greenscreen for filming. 

Luckily, this is not a major setback, our plans to film were only slightly delayed. I was expecting some bumps in the road and if this is a bad as it gets I would consider this project a great success. 

The Knightly News Update

This past week has been a preparation week for my project and I would say that it has been very successful. I have gathered around seven other students to assist me in filming this video series, as well as the necessary cameras, audio equipment, and a spot to film that we can access on our school campus. A couple weeks ago our school held a twitter chat which all students were welcome to join, it was very successful in my opinion and turned out to be very informative. I have decided to host my own and I am excited to do so in the next few months. My primary goals were scheduled to have been met about a week ago, I did meet them as my goals were to gather all of the necessities to begin filming in the next week or so. As I previously said I have gathered all of the cameras, equipment, and hopefully I have gathered enough members to cover the series. Next week I am hoping to create a video that will influence students to not only watch the next one but to also be involved with what is going on around the school. I am hoping to mainly create a fun environment for the students at school and hopefully they will enjoy their time here much more once our videos are released.

Knightly News Update

The past week has been very successful for my Genius Time project. I am a supervisor of sorts of the Knightly News and over the past week I have set the date for next week to film our first "episode". I have gathered around seven people in total to film with me, around 2 behind the cameras and 5 people to do segments. As for the script I have written down several segments that we did last year and will most likely continue along with a new segment that I added that is going to eventually spotlight my peers Genius Time projects as well. In regards to equipment we are pretty well off, we have a green screen, several cameras, and audio equipment. We also have a small room in the school that we have permission to set up in after school. 

If all goes well I am hoping to have at least three episodes filmed each quarter, preferably more but it all depends on everyones schedule. This is obviously something that we would not be able to do all the time because we put a lot of time into the script writing and especially the editing afterwards. After our first video or maybe our second I am going to try to hold a poll throughout the whole school in order to see what students would like to see other than what we have already thought of. Next week my school is starting to host twitter chats throughout the whole school and I am hoping that after a couple we will get a lot of participation from everyone. Later on in my project I would like to host one my self and potentially get a lot more feedback about what we can do better next year and what we can improve on. I am hoping that they will bring forward some great ideas so that we can improve the show. I am very excited to start this project as well as to help out with others and see how theirs turns out as well. A lot of people have some great ideas and I can't wait until I see how they turn out. 

Professional Development

This past week in DigCit we prepared for our presentations in the teachers professional development. We prepared multiple different apps and ways for them to use them for different lesson plans that they could use during class. I think it went well overall and I hope that many of them took what they learned from us and incorporate it into a lesson plan. I presented a tool called Stoodle, Stoodle is a collaborative whiteboard on Safari. Using Stoodle, a group of people can draw and type anything they want to. We presented the main idea that teachers could give students assignments for each slide and after it was completed the Stoodle, which is always saved as long as you have the URL, could be used as a study guide. 

 I was initially worried about the feedback we would receive about students teaching teachers and whether they would take us seriously or not. Overall, they seemed very interested with the tools and we got a lot of positive feedback which I was very happy with. I think if I could work on something a little more it would be to capture their attention towards the beginning, I think it would have gone a little smoother. But overall, I think it went well and all of the teachers learned a lot of great new ways to teach their students.

Passion and Creativity

     My passion project has been going well this past week. In class we have continued to talk about twitter chats and we all participated in some at home. The one I took part in was #whatisschool. In it we mainly talked about how creativity is being stumped by perfection and how students are being taught one way to do things rather than be creative and think of a better way that works for them or for everyone. We also talked about how creativity is very important in school and in some cases can be more important than logic. Speaking of that I found this quote from Albert Einstein and thought I would share it...

As for my passion project, I am still undecided on how I exactly want to recieve feedback. I definitely would like to do a twitter chat with the students at my school, I just worry that I will not get a lot of participation. I am leaning towards doing a survey at first to get a feel for what everyone would like to see in the videos we are making. Then I think I would announce the date and time of the twitter chat so that I could assure that everyone knows about it and when it would be occuring. I am hoping that I can get some good feedback, we are planning on filming in the next month or so. I am planning on releasing a video every week or two, hopefully around 3 a month. Even if you do not attent/work at my school; you may have never heard of my school before but I would love if you do watch the videos once they are released, all feedback is appreciated and encouraged!

Twitter Chat!

This week in class we learned about and planned for a Twitter chat. These are ongoing conversations on twitter using a specific hashtag. A moderator would give out a few questions while this goes on and people would answer and talk to others about their ideas. If I could choose to moderate a twitter chat, I would make one based on creating films and for filmmakers to share their ideas and improve with each other. I would like to do this because creating videos is something I am passionate about and I think a chat like this would be a great place for people to better their ideas with other people.

I think that a Twitter chat could be something that would help out my passion project a lot. I am focusing on a news series for my school and one thing I need to look into is what people would like to see in this and how we can add that into the script. A Twitter chat throughout the school would allow me to reach out to a lot of people at once and get their feedback. There are a ton of students at my school that are using Twitter multiple times a day so I think this way I would be able to reach out to them much easier than using a school website or something along those lines. I think that using a Twitter chat is a very effective way to communicate with others as Twitter is an extremely popular app, especially among people my age. I think that because it is so popular people are more likely to see a conversation and be curious about what it is. This way they will discover the chat on their own even if they do not previously know about it. I think that a twitter chat would be a great way to get some feedback on my project and learn what people would like to see in my videos so that we are more succesful.

The Knightly News

Over the last few days in class, we had a shark tank themed proposal of all of our projects in order to recieve feedback and better our ideas. As for mine, I decided to focus on the news with a group of my friends so that we can involve the students in more after school activities. I recieved a lot of great feedback from my presentation and one idea that I decided to follow was for me to help promote a few other ideas in our news for the school. This way the word can get out locally about what we are doing and hopefully other students will be on board with some of us. 

So far I have learned a lot of great things that I could incorporate into my project. Since the news is a very flexible program for us I can easily add new segments into the video and spread awareness about other passion projects. I think that I would like to have a short segment each time we film the news that can set the spotlight on another project in my class so that the school can be notified about some of our ideas. For this project I have not decided if I will be more infront or behind the camera but I am planning on being behind the camera for the most part and talking about other projects myself so that I can be involved infront of the camera as well as editing and filming. We decided on the name "The Knightly News" for this project last year and I would like to keep that name.

I would like to reach a small benchmark by next week just to get things rolling with this process. We will most likely not begin to film until late September or early October. But, I think by next week I would like to fully plan out the entire script so that when we are ready to film it is on hand. I will not necessarily be writing down exactly what we will say, but more about what we are planning to say, how long it will last, and who will be saying it so that we have an idea of who is going to show up and how long it will take them to film everything. This way when we are ready we are not scrambling to write down everything we need to do and possibly forget something. We will hopefully shoot about one video every 2-3 weeks. But, as for now I am not focused on the filming but more on being prepared for when we do, hopefully by next week I can accomplish this!

My Passion Project

Throughout the past week we have been brainstorming ideas for our passion projects. This is an important part of the process because it is something that we will be working on for the rest of the year. I am not 100% sure about my idea but I do know that I would like to do a documentary of sorts about something that is helping our community and my schools environment. For the past few years I have loved making videos and I think it is something I would like to spend the rest of the year working on. All that is left is to decide the topic that the video will be about. As of now I am thinking about doing some sort of community service with certain groups at my school or documenting the process that other people are going through to further our schools community. By next week I will hopefully have a confirmed idea and will have begun on my project!

My DigCit Experience

DigCit is a very interesting course and I am very excited to be learning new things this year. We have only been in class for about a week now and I have already learned new things about blogging and have had different experiences with technology. We will soon be brainstorming for our Passion Projects, which is where we will be creating a presentation based on a topic we are interested in. Thus far I have encountered several challenges with brainstorming for my project by myself. But, I am hoping that soon I will have an idea so that I can begin to put it together and hopefully complete a project I am proud of by the end of the course. I am passionate about music and technology and would love to incorporate both of those into my Passion Project if possible. I am very excited to learn new things about video/image editing and with that knowledge I hope to be able to create a product of my Passion Project that I am proud of. Hopefully this course will be as exciting as I hope it to be and my Passion Project turns out well!