Game Changer

I chose to create a game like/interactive flow chart to address the social issue of feminism. Instead of focusing on the broad aspect of feminism I narrowed it down to feminism specifically within the LDS church. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of members of the church who automatically associate feminism with the extremists, so they often think feminists are a bunch of crazy lady’s that hate men. A Huffington  Post article states that “feminism is not the belief that one gender should be raised in power above another. The very definition of feminism shows a complete opposition to this belief.” In other words, the basic feminist belief is that men and woman are equal, and therefore should be treated equally. That basic belief is part of church doctrine, but gets complicated within the cultural norms of the church. I also used the Family: A Proclamation to the World to get some ideas for some of the question on the flow chart. Basically the goal is to get people to recognize that if you believe that men and woman are equal then that’s feminism. It may not be radical feminism, but it’s feminism nonetheless. There are different levels of feminism. I’m hoping this game helps members of the church think twice before the say that they aren’t feminists. I also took a look at three different examples of 3 Ad Agencies trying to rebrand feminism to help me get ideas for my flow chart.

Round Robin

Textual Poaching

                                                                     

For my textual poaching assignment I chose to identify myself as being a sister. A couple of years ago my sister passed away, and a result of that has been experiencing somewhat of an identity loss. All of my life my sister has been one of the ways that I identified myself, and she still is, but it's in a different way, because she's not here on this earth with me anymore. Going through this experience I have come to realize just how much my siblings are part of who I am, they make up my identity, and I wanted to represent that through this assignment. Pablo Picasso's paintings have always been very interesting to me, and I felt like doing something similar to his art would help portray what I was feeling. I love looking at Picasso's portraits because they express the complexities that make up an individual. It’s almost as if all of the different things that make a person who they are on the inside surface on the outside. Looking at Picasso’s portraits helped inspire the idea to do something along those lines. I started with my face, and added to it using different parts of my sibling’s faces. The parts that are mine are in black and white, and their parts are in color, representing the color that my siblings bring in to my identity. Without them I would not be the same person.

I think that for my future classroom, this assignment would be really cool for students to analyze some of the characters from novels that we would be studying. They could even choose something from the time that the book takes place to inspire them and then make a modern day adaptation/textual poaching to portray one of the characters.

Process Piece

I chose to create an audio piece documenting me learning how to play a song from the movie La La Land. The one minute clip doesn’t document the song in it’s entirety, but it does represent the process of learning the first page. In order to record part of this song, it actually required me learning how to play the song, and that was the act of labor. Recording music is always interesting, because it seems like every time you record the song turns out different in one way or another, so to try and make it more authentic I recorded it once, and used that recording to capture what it actually sounded like after working on learning the piece for a little bit. An audio piece doesn’t actually show the labor going in to learning the song, but it shows the result of the labor that went into learning the song. 

Medium Specificity

Tea Party Prezi Presentation 

Artist/Teacher Statement

I personally think that Prezi presentations are a lot more engaging than regular power point presentations, just because there is so much you can do with them. Like power point presentations, it’s important that Prezi is used effectively, not just a way to use technology for the sake of using technology. I could totally see my future students using prezi for assignments, but it does cost money. I wonder if schools would look into subscribing to allow students to have access. Prezi is a little difficult to navigate if you aren’t familiar with it, but after spending a solid amount of time figuring things out, it became easer and easier. I love food, and I love tea parties, so I thought it would be fun to create a digital recipe book with all the recipes you need to throw a successful tea party. It would be convenient because you could just pull the presentation up on a tablet/laptop and keep it near while preparing all of the food.  Everything is organized and right at your fingertips.  If future students were to use prezi, they could use it for all sorts of different things including book reports, an explanation of a thesis/paper etc. Prezi allows more creative freedom than powerpoint, but there are also outlines to follow if you don’t want to start from scratch. I started from scratch just because I thought it would be more fun, and because it would help me really grasp the skills needed to create a prezi presentation.  

A Boy and His Orange

For the Digital and Social Media Adaptation assignment, we read Larry Woiwode’s Ode to an Orange, watched Todd Smith’s adaptation of the original story, and then created our own version of the story into a digital and social medium. If I were to apply this assignment to my future English classes, I would start by focusing on a piece of literature that the class has been studying. I would divide students into small groups, or even have them work individually, and each group or individual would be in charge of a chapter from the book. Each group would then take their assigned chapter and make their own condensed digital adaptation. Once finished, students would post their complete adaptation on the class blog. That way the entire class would be able to access other students’ projects. Students would also be required to comment on a certain amount of projects posted on the blog, giving their fellow classmates feedback. Students would be graded on their ability to highlight the main themes and main events in each chapter in a condensed and digital form. This assignment would be beneficial for students because it provides a way for students to better remember important themes and events, as well as converse with their classmates through a digital dialogue. This assignment would also allow for students to engage in learning through various uses of technology, as they explore the ways they can create adaptations through different digital forms. These digital forms include videos, pictures, podcasts, slideshows etc.