Blog Feed

For this quarter I decided to choose to do my own project involving photography. I always had a interest in photography and I never tried to purse it. But this quarter while I was researching on independent art projects to do and I stumbled upon a page on abstract pictures. It had everyday objects but in different angles and shadows. The project looked really cool to do and interesting. I wanted to see if I could recreate my own abstract art and edit them to see what it would be like.

It was hard at first because I am just a rookie taking pictures and I am not good at photoshop so this project was going to be challenging to me but I was up for the challenge. This project challenged me in the best possible way and I really want to try more things with photography.

 This is my process...
For the first part of my project I wanted to start in school. I wanted to see if I could take everyday things and make it portray a different image or emotion by editing it. I went around the school taking pictures of stairs, gates, lockers and other random things posted around the school. My goal was to see it I could make them totally different from what I originally saw them 

Below is my pictures from around the school 

Next...
For another part of my project I chose to find different pictures on the internet that was already abstract or different. My challenge was to tak art that was weird and crazy and portray a feeling already and change it into something that was almost unrecognizable to the orignal work. Working in it was hard because it was difficult to erase an emotion of a picture and portray a new one. I used different shadows and lights to give it a new refreshed feeling. The work below the school picture shows my work.

​What a project? Nothing more then working with a group of friends and coming together to build a presentation about life-changing situations that people live through everyday. In which increases awareness, changes opinions, and as well as changes behavior. A topic that will change everyone’s mind for the better!

         “Gun Violence,” the topic that walked upon us. Gun violence, is a type of violence that is used with a firearm to threaten or inflict harm against someone or something. Violence, behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. Well, first, we brainstormed ideas. We thought of different type of mind changing situations, marked them on the board, and wrote which three we’re most interested in on a card. But me, I wasn’t in class that day. Well mainly, that whole week maybe. I forget. Then, I arrived back in class, the topic already handed to us as well as the introduction of the benchmark. I wasn’t worried about what we had to do, I was more worried about getting it done and being there to communicate and collaborate with my teammates. My group mates suggested that we all do two video’s each. One person did videos and everyone else did the stats, the weebly, editing… etc. I don’t exactly remember everything. My group mates guided me in the right direction to do well on my part of the benchmark, but then again they didn’t want to put too much on me. But overall, it turned out to be a pretty good project!

Our campaign was on school funding. Originally, I was going to create a poster or some other form of visual media for the project. In the end, Taahir took on that role by himself, and I took control of compiling all of our elements together on our Weebly, while adding some more write ups on our mission and what our topic was.

I feel as if our Weebly is laid out in a effective way that will allow viewers to look at it with ease and grasp what our campaign is about. The website has a Mission page, which comprehensively states what our goal for this campaign is. There is an About page where I had written a write up about what exactly is happening to our schools due to the budget cuts, and the importance of school funding. Above, is a multimedia ad-campaign that was created by Callie. I had placed the ad-campaign above because I had observed that most sights place a more visual way of obtaining knowledge first because it is the quickest and easiest way to gain knowledge about the topic. However, some people do prefer to just read the facts and what the topic is about, which is why I wrote the write up below. I also made a section called „Student Voices,” where I put Andrew’s work. There is a page dedicated to Artwork and Posters, where Taahir is displaying his work. In that section, I also added a little comment at the bottom, inviting other people to send in and artwork or posters that they had created about school funding. I thought by allowing other people to contribute to the artwork and poster section would spread the word or make people more interested to get involved. I also created a page called „Take Action,” created to give people a little insight on what they can do as an individual to help fund our schools. It also has a small section with some up and coming events that people can check out. 

My main goal was to combine all of the information we had learned about in a comprehendible and aesthetically way. I think the website will provide people with a general overview on what is happening in the Philadelphia School District regarding budget cuts, as well as what they can do to help.

Arlana Brown

Process Paper

English

Quarter 3 Benchmark

 

 

This project overall was a great opportunity to get very influential message across. For this project I was chosen to be in a group dealing with the topic of Neighborhood High Schools. At first I really didn’t know how to tackle this topic but with the help of my group members I was able to accomplish it. We all realized that we had different plans for the future of our campaign, but we all got together and put our creative minds together and this is our product: MARCH FOR EDUCATION!

 

My first option to present this campaign was to have a video with us stating facts and appealing to youth. The video obviously did not work out but we choose something else. Before we could do anything we needed a motto or slogan. Since our topic was Neighborhood Schools we needed something about education. We each agreed on the motto “It’s either now or never, your education lasts forever.” The motto I believe sets us off very well for a successful campaign. The motto is appealing and gets our point across.

We came in to difficulty with a medium for our project. We choose a Google site but realized it wasn’t too appealing and decided to change it. We put all of our information on webs.com and our campaign came to life.

 

I was in charge of the posters and getting the message across. I choose to use a schoolhouse with a red background because red usually sticks out and gets the message across. With our website we have a picture and a message stating what we are about. I believe the biggest problem was actually figuring out how we would impact the community and get this word out. Saying that we do not go to a neighborhood high school so how would we be able to get this message across? We took a pledge to spread this as best as we could. We are putting it on social media and posting it around our neighborhoods. Our campaign is still growing and we will be near our goal educating everyone.

Aja, Quinn, and Nashrah did a great job with the posters we used as part of our ad campaign, but we had to get them out into the world somewhere. Eventually, I was able to set up the posters at a small school in West Philadelphia called Jubilee School. They also let me take some pictures with the students sitting around them. These pictures were crucial for a PSA video I had decided to make because it gave concrete examples of our 'product' being used. I pieced the video together using the pictures I took of the Jubilee kids, and rolling video shots of our own school library. While the visual effects in the video are simplistic, the worded narration is the main focus. I used Stevie Wonder's song, "Higher Ground," not just because it is a great song, but it's sort of an uplifting song. The mood of the video runs synonymously with the theme of our project, which is to motivate people to read.  

            Before the start of this project, literacy percentages for Philadelphia were not something I knew a lot about. Because of my lack of knowledge, I knew that research would be key in how I pieced together my final products. Since I really had to research the topic, I was able to gather a lot of statistical information about our theme. I was able to write descriptions and short essays on the website explaining why literacy is so important, and why it shouldn’t be ignored.

            The biggest challenge of this project was not in content, but in visualization. I did not realize that iWeb was not in use by Apple anymore, and I didn’t find that out until after our website was finished. Luckily, I realized that if I made the project into a keynote and linked the file as a download, I could easily get the link’s URL to the 'public'. The final keynote was really easy to make because I already had the design from the iWeb, and it accurately depicted our research in an informative and effective manner. I'm also able to tell how many times the file is downloaded from the link by looking at the main page on my Cloud app. 

This is my 3rd qtr benchmark for storytelling. I decided to share this video with everyone because it is something important to me. Hope you enjoy it!

In the beginning of our project, we originally planned on doing a website. We made a weebly but something happened and they wanted us to pay; there were just some complications. In the end we decided to make a video and publish that and hand out brochures and post flyers in different places that had little strips that people could tear off with the link to the video. On the site that the video is on, we can see how many people have viewed our video which can we can use to track our success.

We originally planned on going out and taking pictures on our own but we ran into some moral issues with that so we managed to get a few of our own pictures but then found some of the other ones on the internet. This didn’t really serve as a problem; it just sort of set us back at first because we couldn’t think of a way to get the pictures without taking them. Then it came to us; Google! One issue that we did run into in the end was our brochures and flyers, they were nice and everything but they didn’t really portray our project the way we had planned them to, so I had to stay up and fix those and print them out. We originally planned on doing a simple flyer with a quote then a link to our video. The flyers that Loren made though had a lot of words and pictures and just didn’t really catch people’s attention in a quick way, which is what we were aiming for.

In the end however, we pulled it all together and managed to get everything done and the way that we had envisioned it. Siani researched all the information we asked her to find, Loren made the original flyers and brochures, Isabella made the video and I made the keynote presentation and worked with Isabella to fix the flyers and brochures. I really like how our project turned out and I think it’s a good result of our hard work.

            

​ In our project Nowhere to Hide was a website made by four other group members other then me. We all worked together to create a page to show to the DHS. I felt like with this project we had more freedom then what I thought we were going to have. Our main topic of the project was child abuse. The design of our project was set up with different sections of the websites. Our original plan was to break up each of the parts so each group member had a section to work on.

            In my own opinion I think our original plan did not work out the way that it should of. We completed the very first part saying what we were going to do, and each of us as an individual did that and helped each other out with the research. Then it actually came to the making of the project, our website and I feel as most of the work was pushed onto Toni, but she also made it that way. I only say this because I would ask her what she needed help with and she would never answer me. We would also be in class and each of the group members including me would get off topic and talk about something else. Then when it was time to work Toni would tell me to do something and I would.

            To me it seems like I did absolutely nothing for this project but, I helped. I gave ideas on ways to set up the website and what we could use or how we can sort out the information. I also helped advertise our website we can have people not only in the SLA community see what we have been working on. Also whenever a group member asked em for help I was there to help them. I was suppose to be helping Toni put together the project and video part of the project but she never gave me the chance to help. I feel as though ig I were told to help and was given what to do from my group members I would of felt like I contributed a little more then what I did.

            As a group I believe the project did come out successful though. Through the parts of us getting off topic, some members not doing their parts, or others just not working at all. I think we pulled through a good and clean campaign that is ready to be shown to the workers and representatives of the DHS of Philadelphia. 

For my group’s project we had to debate a lot of things. First of all, one of the most important debates that we had, was what particular way of presenting we will do, and while it wasn’t a large debate since we all are obviously stronger with websites than any other way of presenting, we still argued a bit, over what we should do. After that, came the actual debates. I wanted to have a lot of things some of them being very important, like wanting the color of the font not to be black, however, since all three of my group mates said that black will be the very best color, we have decided to go with the black color, and things like that.

After all of the debates were over (well, not all, there were more to come) we have decided to go with the Iweb, black font, psa the way it is, and having to work with my least favorite type of website maker, however, I grew to like it after this project. I found that it is a lot easier to use than any other type of website maker. However, after the whole website was done, and we were ready to upload, we couldn’t publish it, and thus we decided to move back to the weebly.com idea.

Through a lot of debating and not knowing what, why and how to do and or start this particular project, we ended up with what we have right now, and it actually turned out to be very good. We were also debating on how we should implement it, and the best way that we found was to publish it, and twitter/facebook/myspace people about it, and make sure that people know about it, thus if some people know about it, others will come around, and so on, in a never-ending circle of social websites, this website will be the light in the end of the tunnel for the students that are in danger of dropping out.

For the 4^th Q BM I worked with Arlana, Iraida, and Abe. Our topic is Neighborhood high schools. We started an organization called March For Education. We decided to make a website for our Organization. At first we made a website through Google. It was okay until we noticed that the site looked dull, and boring. So Arlana decided to make a website through webs.com. Our new website is called http://marchforeducation.webs.com/index.htm.

         On the new site people can give us feedback on what they think about or organization. We have statistics about Neighborhood Schools, which should make any person want to join the March For Education. The drop out rate in America is 37%. That’s is pretty bad. During the process of research of this project I learned about how bad off the neighborhood schools, and schools in general are.

         During the process I was responsible for three things, and they were setting up the website, drawing a picture of a hand/taking a picture of our group, and editing the grammar on the website.

         I set up the pages on our original site. Those pages were Home Page, FAQS page, Video Page for our PSA, Contact Us Page, and Overview of our Campaign page. We started to put work on here, but we didn’t like how the site looked, so we made a new website. Arlana transferred all of our work to the new website. My next job was posting a picture of a hand that had our slogan in it. Our slogan is, “It’s Now or Never Your Education Last Forever.” Under the hand it says join hands and March For Education.

         The process for making this project for me should have been easy because of the small amount of work I had to do. I at first was bored with this topic because it was about neighborhood schools. Why do I care about neighborhood schools, they have nothing to do with SLA. Well I was wrong for thinking that. After I learned that most teachers don’t care for the students in neighborhood schools, and that the students don’t learn as much as they should, my attitude changed. There is no reason why the drop out rate is 37%. That is awful. So I can say my process in making this project was good & bad. I’m glad this project was made.

Andrew Chalfen

Process Paper

3/29/12

 

When I heard that I had creative rights to make this project into my own artistic style I knew I was going to have fun with it. I was given the topic of school district funding something that I strongly feel is a large issue in modern day education systems around the world but especially in the Philadelphia public school district. I’ve had other opportunities to learn about school district funding so when this project was assigned I was actually quite prepared as far as ideas went. As far as actually creating the project I knew the things I wanted to avoid were a long written paper, or something that involves a lot of technical work. I don’t very often enjoy writing and I’ts hard for me to incorporate any type of visual component into a paper. I also get easily frustrated with computers so any advanced website or “prezzi” would have to be left for my other group members. The way I was best at contributing was through social media.

 

I brainstormed my favorite social media ideas and decided to go with the one that stuck out as the most interesting. I have a lot of connections to high school students from schools all across Philadelphia. I used these connections by asking a diverse variety of students a sequence of questions. I chose students from all different ethnicities and cultures in over fifteen different Philadelphia public and charter schools. The point of these questions was to ask the students how school district funding directly affects them and their school communities. Its not often students are given a voice in the decisions that affects their everyday lives so this project means more to me then just a grade. I honestly intend to keep up with this research and at some point submit my data and finished product to the school district itself. I will outline what data has been collected, what the data says about our school systems, and what positive suggestions students have contributed.

 

A major challenge I was faced with was identity. Many of the students I interviewed did not want to be identified given that their candid responses could be considered disrespectful. I opted to include pictures of the students but keep names out. This way I can show what exterior appearance the students choose to personify without giving anyone the opportunity to find out more about these students.

 

My group and I have worked together well. At the beginning of the project we all outlined goals for ourselves and for the group. Each member has contributed in their own way and had a positive impact on this project. I really enjoyed the idea and process of this project and would highly recommend Ms Pahomov to continue it in future years. One suggestion I would make however would be to mandate some sort of outside sources. Kind of like how I got information from students at other schools, any of the projects in the class could have used a source outside of SLA, I don’t know how many others took advantage of that. Overall I would say great project and I feel strong about what I contributed.

                                    

    For the project I was assigned to work with jesús, Taylor and Steven. The group was good for me because they were people I easily got along with. Although we all had things that made it so we couldn’t work we addressed those thing and the project went through very smoothly. None of us argued or complained about where the project was headed which made things easy on everyone. I was left in charge of the video and website. I did the best I could for the website which was a slight bit difficult based off of what we had, but the video went great. Jesús was a great help making the script for the video and finding some other components for it. I handled the rest of the video and although I wasn’t in class some days I made sure I got what I had to do done while out of class so we could have all of our components done on time. I worked on the production of our video component, which meant I had to film, act and edit the footage we got. Taylor and Steven helped me with acting and Jesús gave me stuff that would further help me edit. In the end I would love to work with this group again because we worked together very well and all made sure we got out work done on time. Everyone did what he or she had to do and no one even began to argue during the course of the project. I feel that we worked as a good team and everyone got done what they had to get done.

I choose the topic child abuse because I thought it an issue that is important but pushed aside. So for this project my group divided the work process and we decided to make a website. I was assign to do the statistics. First I started to do my research on child abuse. As I start the was a lot of information on child abuse and I wasn’t sure where to start digging for information that would make our project stand out and would have fact that was collected by reliable sources.

 I went through and I checked the different websites that I thought would be useful. I came upon one website that was called U.S Department of Heath and Human Service   Administrator for Children and & Family. The website have a lot of database that was very useful. For example the have pie chart PDF. They also had information on adoption, how many cases where reported. These database and research dates back to 1995. This website provide national data on adoption, foster care, child abuse and neglect and child welfare. I would recommend this website to and one who wants information on child abuse. I have went trough most the PDF and information on this website to find information on our topic. So I choose to do child abuse in the last four years. Researching on the statics of child abuse helped to bring cross our topic and give more meaning to the presentation.

 We used the statics to emphasize that the child abuse is still happening. We hoped this caught the audience’s attention. First our audience was supposed to be the DHS but we didn’t know how to create the project that it wouldn’t be offensive. There is a chance it would be a big issue if we take on the DHS and say they aren’t doing their work, after we are teenagers. So we change our audience to the parents and the public in general. Toni put the website together with the information we all had put in. I found a website counter that worked so we could see how many people viewed our website. Then for the promoting part of our picture we all went on Twitter and promoted our website. Now over a thousand people view our website. I went on Facebook and promoted some more and there was a lot of responses form a lot of people. So the website counter one of the way that we used to measured our success. Our website was published this we and has more that a thousand views. Also the comment I got from the people on Facebook was great, they appreciate the information that was produce and the think that child abuse is important. One challenge that a few times there was a couple absences and we did get to use the time wisely, the rest of the group that was there came together and worked to finished the project. I think our campaign was successful. 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2270958/Mdonzo%20MBK.mov.zip

In the beginning when we first had started this I already knew that personally my strong factor was to get all of the statistics. I work best with numbers so when my group and I decided that that I could do the statistics I was actually really ecstatic.

Personally when I did my research I was looking for the wow factor, I needed like information about how many kids were really getting abused. Also I took out information about like what types of children were being abused. I also found one of those statistics that is like every minute a child is being reported for child abuse.

I feel as if my strengths in this project had to be like getting my statistics to Toni, who was our collector in our group, fast. Like I had already gotten most of my information within the third class period and I had sent her all of it.

In my group we’re making a iWeb, personally I saw it being put together but probably not going to be ale to see the finished product. Last class we talked about adding some more things to it, just to make it like more flashy like a counter that says how many people have been on the website.

I feel as if I liked my group, we all had different strengths but altogether we worked pretty well at getting this benchmark done.

 

For the campaign, I was responsible for a number of things. One, I was in charge in dividing the work for people so everyone gets a fair share of the work. I helped keep my group members in line and keep constant contact with them to make sure they were being productive. I helped create the proposal, which was also part of the division of the work aspect of it. Sometimes it was hard to do this since some group members often didn’t show up to class to help work on it, leaving some of us to do most of the work.

I also made the keynote component of the campaign. The keynote consisted of statistics and images that I had to search for on the Internet. One major challenge of doing this was finding the stats itself. It was difficult enough trying to find specific statistics on our topic, but having to do it for a particular city resulted in multitudes of useless sources. I had to dig through and read almost every source in order to find meaningful enough information. Then I had to make sure these statistics were accurate by searching for more sources that mentions said information in order to validate its accuracy. I then got the idea that a timeline element would help the audience see how Philadelphia has progressed with our topic, which I implemented.

Event though I was only able to find only a handful of information, I’m optimistic in the way I have set up the presentation, that it is enough to leave an impression. Also, I’m confident that having the video, keynote, website, and posters put together will result in an engaging and effective presentation for the audience. And the fact that our other components are also able to cover the outside audience assures me that we did a swell job as a group. 

Callie Monroe

Air Stream

Quarter 3 Benchmark

Process Paper

 

My initial assignment within my group was to make a short PSA that addressed all of the issues surrounding school district funding in Philadelphia. Such an honest assignment turned into something with many problems and difficulties that were not initially though of. The largest of these problems was that I do not have very many good technical skills. I know my way around the computer and can do most teenager things like facebook and ichat but crafting a video was a whole other story. I fooled around with imovie for a bit but all of my attempts seemed terrible. I then remembered a website that Ms Pahomov shared with my English class called Prezi. On this site I could pretty much just plug in all of my information and a good video/slideshow was sure to be produced. It is also much more user friendly than most video creating applications so I was able to use my limited computer skills more affectively. Another great thing about making a Prezi is that they are more interactive because the viewer has to physically change the slide. This brings me to another challenge that I had with the video.

I have seen lots of PSA’s in my life and some have stuck with me while most have not. I knew that in order for this multimedia aspect of my groups campaign to work it needed to be very visually appealing and not too boring. To overcome this challenge I decided to make my Prezi quite short. If it had been long people would either get incredibly bored and forget everything or stop watching in general. I also needed to pick key and important facts to represent and not try and tackle the whole issue of school district budget cuts. I think that I did a good job of this and that the Prezi turned out well.  Something that really helped with this was having my group members peer edit my Prezi before I published it.

A second aspect of the project that I worked on was the actual website that we decided to host all of our different components. Initially my group and I were going to put each component of our project up on different mediums but the problem with this was that they then wouldn’t mesh together very well. Creating a website allowed for all of our work to be hosted together.

In the end I think that my groups campaign turned out very well because we did a good job of collaborating together. Each of us had a skill that we were good at and it was really great that we were all able to bring them together to make a final product that we can all be proud of.

 

 

Of the time I was present with my group, I was able to do a few things with them regarding the project regarding government corruption. Over the weekend, I started thinking of ideas, and writing the script for the video the rest of the group is going to create. I was aiming for something that would put the viewer to think, to ponder about who they are really voting for. I took a real serious approach to the project, but then figured it wasn't going to captivate people. The group wanted a video that would be both fun to make and fun to show. After the rough draft was done, Monday I spend time with the rest of the group, throwing ideas back and forth and seeing example ads politicians use to get themselves out there (some of the ads we saw were pretty bizzare). The newer script started to be written at that point. We all had an input into the script and contained some essance of each of its group members. On Tuesday, I wrote with Dylan once more and we made a final design for the video, which we also decided wasn't going to specifically be and ad. We just want to inform people about who they're voting for, and also to keep in mind that voting also requires a little research. Corrupt polititcians are there because we put them there. They didn't magically appear. Unfortunately, I had to leave my group a few days early. But I feel assured that with the basic plan we made with the script and our time together, our campaign video is going to fall into place nicely. 

For my groups project we created a campaign targeting the problem of littering within the community of SLA. SLA has a huge problem with litter around the school and we really want to see this change. For this campaign we spilt up rolls so we could have many things all supporting the same idea and hit people in ever-possible angle.

My part of this project was to create a pledge that students of SLA could take. This pledge consisted of how students of SLA should be acting and treating their school, for example throwing away their trash and encouraging others to also throw away trash. The pledge was to get people to promise they will try to keep the school clean. After people pledged they signed a large piece of paper that is now hanging in front of class so other students can see that their fellow students are working towards a better and clean school and to also remind the people that did sign it that they should remain true to the pledge they promised to follow.

I also created a twitter account. This account was created to help reach out to the SLA community even more. Many students have twitter and use twitter to stay connected. It is also used as a place to go when they need an escape during class, so why not fill their feed with facts about littering. I followed many students at SLA and also asked students to follow back. On this account students have hash tagged us a few times as well as a teacher. I plan to keep this twitter going and sending tweets out so people know how things in the school are looking.

The most challenging part of this project was trying to discover what exactly would help make this campaign a success. We didn't want to pick just anything, we wanted it to speak to people and make people care and that is why I directly spoke to students here at SLA and also through a common social media site that is highly used during school hours. 

   My piece is showing how Macbeth went from doing killing people himself, to having people do it for him. Also form the regret he felt after killing Duncan to having murders kill Banquo for him. 

So in my part of the project i was asked to gather information on government corruption if Philadelphia. Although it was not the easiest task because philadelphia has been in a way not very corrupted by the government but then i found a site talking about  Corey Kemp who was the Philadelphia's treasure. He was the youngest person to be appointed a treasurer, but then he was charged with 27 different charges of corruption all ranging form wire fraud, mail fraud, tax fraud, and extortion. He was brought to trail and the judge had said that he only had himself to blame and that he had so much promise. After that the judge sent Cory Kemp  jail for 10 years. Other than that small corruption there has not been any other corruption since so it has been had to find any more information. Then I found a web site that was talking about what political corruption was and if you need a lawyer to defend you and if you were accused of political corruption then you should call the lawyer William Spade. All of his information was on the website. It also said that he was the lawyer that represented Corey Kemp when he was put on trial.

The producing part was very simple beside all of the information that I was asked to gather I was supposed to help dylan with the website if he ad started it but he never mentioned it so I don’t think that we are doing the website. The summaries of all of the websites that I gathered are going onto the poster. Also the information form the poster is going onto the website when we start working on it. The design I have not seen yet because I did not see the website or the poster yet. The difficult thing was finding other government corruption stories that did not all involve Corey Kemp or was just political corruption. Although it was very easy to find information on Corey Kemp and exactly on what he did. 

Enjoy :)

Choosing a topic was fairly easy for us. We made a short list of things we knew about but could find more information on. A few topics that were listed were Martin Luther King Jr. and the Million Man March, Rosa Parks and the Bus Boycott and Malcolm X, and his Existence in the Muslim Community. We looked into the one we though were more interesting and essentially found that Malcolm X’s story was the most interesting to look into more in depth. We decided that this topic was also a better idea than the others because in the general Malcolm X story, there was more than one revolution to focus on.

            We went about finding out information by breaking up the project into categories that we were going to focus on. We essentially focus on his voyage to Mecca, his empowerment in the Muslim community, X being sanctioned, and his death. After deciding how we were going to divide the topics, we gather information on those topics separately. After compiling the information and the liable sources into primary and secondary sources categories, we decided that all of the sites we used weren’t necessary and began to disqualify them from our sources. When we had the sources we wanted to use, we found the connection between all the different topics we talked about within our general topic.

Before we started the whole process and everything, first we had a 15-20 minute brainstorm session. We did a 20-minute brainstorm session so we could gather a lot of ideas together. So then my partner said how about we do Malcolm X. Well I said I don’t know too much about him but my partner said she does. I said well this is perfect because I can do a lot of the researching and she can do a lot of the design. Well it turns out we both got a lot of information and we both did a lot of the design. Overall I think our process was pretty good because we did everything on time and a good quality of work.

Our project relates to the NHD theme because our project followed the whole rubric for the Nation History Day Competition. We clearly went back in time and picked an event to research and find a revolution, reaction and reform. We decided to do a website because we could put a lot of different information on it without being timed because we were going to originally do a documentary but we decided to do a website. A website was also a good choice because it allowed us to compile information without having it cluttered or confusing to follow.

 

Bibliography

 

Primary Sources:

Travels to Mecca:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=539

"A Summing Up: Louis Lomax Interviews Malcolm X by Louis Lomax."TeachingAmericanHistory.org -- Free Seminars and Summer Institutes for Social Studies Teachers. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=539>.

(interview with Malcolm x)

This source is an interview with Malcolm X about his trip to Mecca and how that trip effected him and his views on Islam. He gained so much knowledge about his religion and everything involving that when he returned back to the states that he initially became the spokes person for the Nation of Islam. We’ve decided to use this particular source because, as it is full of information, it also gives a first hand incite on the direct impact of his travels.

 

Going to and coming home from prison:  

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/shabazzs-grand-jury-testimony?page=0

"Shabazz's Grand Jury Testimony | The Smoking Gun." The Smoking Gun: Public Documents, Mug Shots. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/shabazzs-grand-jury-testimony?page=0>.

(His testimony before he went to prison) This is Malcolm X’s testimony before he was sentenced to his time in prison. The testimony gives some sense of how he felt about why he went to prison and how he felt about going to prison for what he was going for. We’ve decided that this a good primary source for this topic because, again, we’re learning about it more or less from his mouth.

 

 

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/malcolms-rap-sheet?page=0

"Malcolm's Rap Sheet | The Smoking Gun." The Smoking Gun: Public Documents, Mug Shots. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/malcolms-rap-sheet?page=0>.

(His rap sheet)

This is Malcolm X’s rap sheet. The reason we decided to use this was to further out knowledge on how many times Malcolm X went to jail and the reasons behind them to strengthen our opinions on what type of man he was and what he really stood for.

 

   His death:

     http://www.criticalreading.com/malcolm.htm

"Malcolm X." Dan Kurland's Www.criticalreading.com -- Strategies for Critical Reading and Writing. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.criticalreading.com/malcolm.htm>.

(news article) This website is just a direct link to a few articles about Malcolm's death. In the articles they talk about who he was and what happen to him. They have a few statements from witnesses that were there. 

 

 

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/malcolm-morgue?page=0

"Malcolm In The Morgue | The Smoking Gun." The Smoking Gun: Public Documents, Mug Shots. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/malcolm-morgue?page=0>.

(his autopsy pic) This is an actual photo of malcolm X's dead body at the morgue. We used this picture for the tension and reality of his death on our website to add effect to that section. 

 

 Secondary Sources:

http://www.malcolm-x.org/bio/timeline.htm

"Malcolm X - Biography Timeline." Welcome to Malcolm-x.org. Web. 05 Jan. 2012. <http://www.malcolm-x.org/bio/timeline.htm>.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmalcolmX.htm

"Malcolm X : Biography." Spartacus Educational. Web. 05 Jan. 2012. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmalcolmX.htm>.

http://www.africawithin.com/malcolmx/malcolm_bio.htm

Necessary, Any Means. "Biography of Malcolm X." Africa Within. 2001. Web. 05 Jan. 2012. <http://www.africawithin.com/malcolmx/malcolm_bio.htm>.

These 3 sources are all Biographies of Malcolm X. The difference between these 5 sources is that they all give information that the other doesn’t as far as dates and information. Also, they aren’t 100% accurate so to have more than one is better than having one not 100% accurate source.

 

 

http://www.ushistory.org/us/54h.asp

"Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam [ushistory.org]." Ushistory.org. 2008. Web. 05 Jan. 2012. <http://www.ushistory.org/us/54h.asp>.

This source is someone’s view about who Malcolm was through the Nation of Islam. It tells about how he lived through his religion and who he became because of it. It also explains the effect he had on other people because of the effect the Islam had on him. We’ve decided to use this source because although as a secondary source it is not 100% accurate or reliable, it had good information worth using for the task at hand.

 

 

http://www.colostate.edu/orgs/MSA/find_more/m_x.html

"Malcolm X." Colorado State University - Fort Collins. MSA. Web. 05 Jan. 2012. <http://www.colostate.edu/orgs/MSA/find_more/m_x.html>.

(Timeline) This site is a time line of Malcolm X's life. This site points out different things that he did in his life, providing us with dates and things to focus on as far as his story. We've decided to use this site because instead of researching blindly, we could look this over and decide which, of many, revolutions in his life that we would focus on. Then from there we could locate the reaction and reform later on the timeline, making the figuring out what the revolution, reaction and reform portion of the research already taken care of, giving us more time to focus on actual research.

 

I was put into a group with Dylan, Jesus and Stephen. At first I was quite skeptical about working with them. I didn’t know how we would do together as a group but as soon as we started discussing our problems I stopped worrying. I’m not very good with computers or making videos so when Dylan and Jesus said they wanted to make a video I wasn’t excited. But film editing and making videos are their specialties so all I had to do was read lines. There wasn’t a single argument within our group. We all agreed on things and no one was angry about the decisions that were made. The first day of a free work period Jesus and Dylan were both absent from class. That made it really stressful for Stephen and I for the simple fact that we didn’t want to make posters without the rest of our group being present. I got in contact with Jesus and he made sure to help us out with the script and e-mail it to all of us so we knew what we had to work on for the upcoming week. On Monday when we had class again my group was ready to work. Dylan and Jesus already had all the video materials put together and we started filming that day. It made me glad that my whole group got along and there was no bickering about who would do what and how much work each of us was going to contribute. Our only real challenge was that we only had two days when all of us were there together. Usually it was just Stephan and I. If I could work with this group again I would. It was a good eclectic mix of skills. I was good with the finding information Stephan was good with