Individual Digital Project
This project had to be one of the most frustrating for me throughout my college career. At first, it was a pretty smooth sailing experience. I had my ideas, and everything was flowing pretty well. I knew where I wanted to go with the project and mapped it out accordingly. As problems began to pop up, I was able to maneuver myself around them. The vision of my presentation changed as I was putting it together. It originally was going to focus on just the stereotypes that are presented in a young adult sports novel; however, I chose to mold it into a introduction to that specific genre. It made sense for me to highlight stereotypes still, but I also wanted to put in some of the other features of these novels. There are three core themes or characteristics in this genre, and each were talked about in the presentation. I really liked the idea of presenting this as the beginning of a unit or project for my future classroom. I would love to have my class read some young adult sports novels while in my class, and this project would be the perfect(maybe not perfect) gateway to the genre.
I also discovered that this would be a good thing to do for a lot of my lessons. It would be useful to use this type of project as an opening to any new unit or concept we will be studying. However, the process for completion is very time consuming. I do not know if I would be able to have this type of opening for every project in my first year, but I can see this being a huge part of curriculum by the time my third year rolls around. I think my students would really respond to the use of technology in presenting projects, and they would also maybe be interested in learning to do it themselves.
I had three major problems when putting together this project. The first one happened as I first starting the project two weeks ago. I had just inputted half the slides, and my laptop came unplugged. This would not be a problem for most people, but my battery is zapped which results in my laptop shutting off immediately. It erased everything that I had done and even forced me to download Photostory again. This was by far the most frustrating thing that happened. I put the computer down and took a long break from the project. When I returned to the project, I had a hard time getting my slides to save correctly. They were saving as transparent images instead of the way I had them. After some maneuvering and improvising, I was able to get them to save correctly. My last problem is my fault; I had the bright idea to just save the voice recording for the last minute. This was the biggest mistake I made personally in the whole process. The microphone that I was using would not stop doing a clicking sound, and I had a hard time getting it to transition properly. I was able to at least get this part of the project to be presentable even though I am still not very happy with how it turned out.
Looking back on the project, I really wish I would have done things a bit differently. Seeing the final product, I think there are a few different places I could have went with it that would have been more effective. If I would have focused on maybe a more specific aspect of the genre, it might would have flowed more effectively. However, I do think this would serve as a great example for the opening of a unit or project on young adult sports novels. This project took a lot more time than I was thinking it would, and it was truly a challenge. I am happy and pleased to say that I was able to complete something that was challenging to me. I was very intimidated by the project at first, but I really feel like I learned a lot and can improve my abilities in the long run.
