Reflections and BLOSCARS

I want to start by saying that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging. It seems like just yesterday I was panicking with Taylor about what to name my blog. Turns out, it really doesn’t matter that much. This really was a useful tool for gathering my ideas and sharing them with all of you beautiful people.

Professionalism: I went with “The Writing Process.” In this post I stuck to my reflection of the writing process and how I might help students through it. (Though, I did use an article that had a swear word in it–not very professional). I felt my voice was clean, straightforward, and exemplified this category best.

Design: For design I chose “Playing Around with Multimodal Composition.” My decision to select this one for best design really relied on the actual multimodal composition shown in the post. I took a rather touchy topic of Sexual Assault and made the information accessible through it’s design.

Creativity: “A New Way to Tell My Story” showed my best creative work. I took a little bit of a risk by creating a VoiceThread to communicate my ideas. I really enjoyed writing this post and explaining my creative process.

People’s Choice (as defined by last weeks class): For my people’s choice blog entry I believe “Experiences with Being a Writing Coach” fit best. My images and link work well with the message of my post. There is a good balance of voice and professionalism and a nicely placed quote by Ernest Hemingway to tie it all together.

Now the hardest part is choosing my BLOSCARS People’s Choice Award. Everyone’s blog was magnificent in their own ways. There were many who had nailed voice down, which I find incredibly hard to do. There were many with fantastic design and well placed links and images. It really came down to two favorites of mine but I nominate….(drum roll)…..Ashley Gemeinhardt with her blog “From the Mind of Nerd” for the People’s Choice Award. I really enjoyed reading her posts. She had a good flow of images and links that mixed well with her words. She had a very personal/readable voice, but I also learned from her posts. Well done Ashley! I hope you keep blogging.

Playing Around with Multimodal Compostion

I decided to create an infographic about sexual assault in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month happening through April. I wanted to create an infographic that I could share with others, just to relay some knowledge about the subject. My plan is to distribute these at work during the month of April and at our Violence Resource Fair at UWM (April 27th).

As I created this infographic, I took note of some things I had to do in order to be successful. First I needed to do my research. I wanted to present correct information, so I went to various websites, gathered what I felt was important, and got that ready to add to my graphic. Pulling the research together was actually fun to do because I felt I had a purpose for it. I feel that high school students would feel the same way. Students would engage in this activity because they feel a sense of purpose for it .

I used Piktochart to create my beautiful infographic. This website was amazing! They had so many templates to choose from. Choosing a template actually took me a lot of time, but there was a good reason for it. I wanted to find a template that expressed the mood and didn’t have clutter. I wanted my composition to be neat and appealing to the eye to best share my knowledge. I also had to make decisions about which icons and pictures worked best with the theme of each statement. All my decisions started to come together to create a digital writing piece I would happily share.

Creating my infographic was a lot of fun and engaged me in the subject matter I was attending to. Jenkins writes, “The individual is willing to go through the grind because there is a goal or purpose that matters to the person.When that happens, individuals are engaged, whether that be the engagement in professional lives or the learning process or the engagement that some find through playing games” (23). Students can play around with something (like creating piktocharts) and learn about the subject matter teachers want. And students feel they have accomplished something with purpose, maybe even something they would be willing to share.

(In case you would like to see a closer up of my infographic Click Here)