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            For our third quarter benchmark I worked in a group with Christian, Serg, and Bethany. The topic that we were assigned to campaign about was High School Drop Outs. I was really happy about being assigned this topic because dropping out of high school is a topic that I feel very strongly about so it made it a lot easier to campaign since I am interested in my topic. Overall it was a good experience working with my group members on a project that I enjoyed.

            I feel like for the first few days of being assigned this benchmark my group members and I were stuck because we didn’t know what exactly to write about our topic, for everything on the internet felt repetitive and boring. We wanted to find a way to be creative, as well as inform people. We finally decided that it would be a good idea if we each picked a different way of broadcasting our topic, and put them all together in a website. The topic I chose was videos. I feel like my group members and I all got a little off topic leading us to do our topics, plus a little more work as well because we didn’t want to just do our assigned topics.

            For my video I made a video of me pretending to be at work at McDonald’s. I kept saying in the video how this is where you’re going to be if you drop out of high school still working at your minimum wage paying job that you had as a kid, into you adult years. I felt this would send the message to my peers and others that if you don’t graduate, you won’t be able to actually grow up and leave childish things behind, like your not well paying job at a fast food restaurant. As well as the video, I thought it would be cool if I added an add to promote why dropping out is negatively looked at so I did lots of editing and created an add that I’m pretty proud of, it’s actually on the cover of our website. Also, my group made a pledge not to drop out, which I thought was pretty inspiring.

            All in all I think that my group members and I all did an equal amount of work and it was a pretty good experience. I enjoyed the people I worked with and I wouldn’t change anything about my project!

Click HERE for the project if the embedded presentation fails to work.

      The two countries that I selected were Greece and Hong Kong (not actually considered a country). Greece has recently been through some hard times with its economy and Hong Kong has had a thriving economy because of the help it readily receives from its homeland of China. Hong Kong has a host of trade partners though its connections with China, but that also leaves it with a large amount of enemies as well. Greece, while not having many trade partners, which hurts its economy is not bombarded by hostiles as much because it is so low key when compared to other countries in the area.
     My process was fairly simple. It took a while to gather research and other information regarding the economies of both of these countries because they both have such a rich history. Hong Kong has always had a strong economy and getting to the bottom of why this is true was a challenge because many wondered whether staying true to China would be a good move for them. Although the "country" wants to break away from China, they really have no choice but to stay with the homeland because their big corporations and banks keep Hong Kong's economy thriving. It was a bit easier finding information on Greece because of their recent economical mishaps. The five points of framework were somewhat difficult to apply to these countries because I couldn't tell if I should apply them to just recent events or things that had happened far back in the past.
     If there was anything that I could change about my project it would be to choose a form of presentation that could get my information across better than a keynote. I feel like I could have said a lot more but restricted myself because I wanted the keynote to look a bit nicer. However, I fell like the keynote got the point I was trying to make across to the viewer well enough.

The idea of making a campaign was very difficult for me as I did not do work on such a project before.  So it was very hard for me to come up with an idea. But my group members helped me in this situation. We put so many thoughts in front of each other  in order to make this campaign more real.

 

We tried to come with ideas to present in front of target audience. We also thought that what should be our target audience.  Obviously it was very hard to choose the audience and then convey them a message. After so many thoughts my group member and I decided to choose younger children. Because I think this is the best age to learn. So after deciding our target audience we then started thinking about how to present in front of children.  I was very confuse during this process because it was very hard for me to brain storm for a strong idea.  But at last we decided to make posters. For me it was actually easy to make a poster. Aja and Quinn also decided to make posters and then asked from me. As I was also thinking of this so also planed that we should make posters.

 

As our target audience was younger children so we decided to make colorful posters because kids are attracted by colors. So me, Aja and Quinn started making posters.

Me and Quinn made a poster. She drew a cartoon and I wrote “How well can you read?” in bubble writing and then we colored that . My group members were vey happy to see that because that idea was very strong to attract children by cartoons and different types of colors. Similarly Aja made a poster with colorful same word that we wrote but she drew a book on both end sides of the poster. At one side of the book she wrote word literacy and on the other side side of the poster she wrote the same word but in opposite way. Which was actually a good idea.  That everyone when look at the poster, will think a moment about that what actually it is.

 

Then after making poster we now started to brain storm about the ideas for making video . And it was actually very hard not only for me but also for other members too.

Because making a poster and then filling that with colors was not actually as video was.  I think our poster idea was very effective because of the cartoon characters and color collection.

 

Now the main thing that how to present this in front of audience . Which is really hard for me . It is also very difficult for my group mates to put the main idea of  campaign that everybody understand  what actually we are trying to figure out . We also want to meet the expectations of the project and Miss Pahomov as well.  So we still trying to make this project more strong. Because we want to present our project with the strong  core message.

 

 

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After reading Macbeth, our english class did a project all about the character development of the character's in the story, and this is my project. I did a drawing that also had a written portion to it. This drawing symbolizes Macbeth's character change from a valiant soldier to, an evil murderer, to his eventual death.

Angelina y Bailey!

My group and I created a campaign to promote literacy. I contributed as best I could to the campaign, and I feel like I was fairly helpful in my own ways. I encouraged the idea of making posters and thoroughly supported putting them in public places like the children’s sections of local libraries. When we worked on making the posters, I contributed to the overall project with my artistic skills and creativity, and drew an orange cartoon style cat on the poster, holding a sign that asks the viewer, “How well can you read?” Aja came up with the phrase, and I suggested that we use it as the title of our campaign. The rest of the group seemed to like it, and we agreed on using it as our title. When we were talking about where we wanted to put the posters, I suggested the library of a school with young children in it, but we decided against posting them there. I also did some research for the videos, looking up facts and statistics that we could use to prove our point. I also cited most of the sources that my group members and I found soon after we posted the link onto the Google doc. When it came to figuring out how to tell whether or not the campaign we created was effective, I helped test the system we plan on using via email. The test involved sending a form to my email address and I responded. Then we were able to teach ourselves to read the data that is presented to us after people respond to the questions we send out. While the project is not quite done yet, I think there is still much I can do to help out, for example, I may have to place the posters at a couple nearby libraries. 

This presentation is about the play written by Shakespere.On these slides as you guys can see there are plenty of quotes this just simply simbolizes the change that Macbeth or the protagonist goes through.I used colors that will attract my viewers by using very bright and vivid colors in which nicely compliment well with the entire slide show as well.As you guys can see, I used several of images because I wanted to make it as interesting as possible.Therefore,I included a bibliography to make the information accessible and helpful for my fellow classmates and viewers.

:) 
Enjoy

As the media component being my part, I took this role very seriously. Media has to attract the eyes of all the viewers. Weather the topic is sad or not. You need to be able to present it where it will attack thee soul and there mind. for this project I decided to take another side approach. Since, my group is doing homelessness in Philadelphia, I decided to write up a flyer and a brochure. This brochure and flyer can be used to spread the word around.

 

            It was hard at one time when trying to do this because I know doesn’t know how it feels to be homeless, but I do know its something that no one should be able to experience.  I had a few interactions with homeless people. Some were good and some were bad. So I took that into consideration, and put all of my feelings to the side to do this project. It wasn’t hard once I realized how many homeless people I’ve helped. I helped volunteer at churches and my  to feed the homeless around the city of Philadelphia.

 

            My experience with the homeless was heart filling. These people are just like you and I. They are living on the streets of our city trying to make is somewhere somehow with very little. It’s sad to know that some people just don’t care about the people of their own city. If we where a stronger city that give once and awhile we would be making it. To sit and listen to the stories they tell. They too had once had a live to live. They went to school, had family, and had a job.

 But his or her luck just didn’t last long like everyone else.

 

            People just like to assume that all of the homeless doesn’t deserve to get help because when it’s offered they do not take it. I wanted this project part of mines is to basically show that there are homeless people that do try to get themselves together. It shows why and how these people become homeless. Since, this world is so involved into money that we forget that our human. Money can be a real take over, and people kill for it.

 

         My part of the project was to put out all of the facts that would make someone think twice about their first opinion of what homelessness was. I wanted to make it where it was easy to understand and get all of the fast and basic information about the homeless in our city. I made sure to add a lot of photos that came from Philadelphia, and the events around the city. I even created a poem that I placed on the back of the brochure. I hope that it makes more Philadelphians understand.

The idea of making a real campaign to reveal to the outside world seemed as if it was a semi easy task. After putting more thought into it and reading the guidelines it was more of a challenge to come up with an idea than anything.

            Trying to figure out how we wanted to convey the message to the audience that we chose was the hardest thing for my group mates an I to do. Considering the fact that the target audience was mainly younger children. What ever my group mates and I decided to had to be appealing to younger children, but I knew I wanted to have posters in it. If I was not sure about anything else or another idea having a poster was something I didn’t want to let go of.

            So making a poster is what Quinn and I decided on, when children see colorful posters they tend to look at them. Or sometimes even drawn “funny” things on them, a child actually writing on a poster is not affective of course but when children write on papers they observe them first. That is actually what we want children to do, observe the posters. My idea was to have the poster read, “How well can you read?” in all capital letters, with a backward “e” in the word read in my opinion that would be affective. If a child is looking at the poster and thinks there is nothing wrong with it after reading it a few times they will be more than likely see that there is a problem with a word and start to pay attention when they are reading things an if they understand what they read. I was thinking along the lines of something like that we I talked to my group mates about incorporating poster into our campaign.

            After deciding to make the posters and talking to my group mates about the video aspect of the campaign I think that, design was actually the easy part of the entire campaign. Making the poster was easy to design because the only thing that had to have most of the thought into it was a slogan for it and after that the only thing that was needed was the color. Putting color into an abstraction is the easy part because by then the target audience was known and the color scheme usage was already built up in my head from the beginning of the project.

            Making the poster and the color choice where the straightforward parts. The harder part was getting started with the project. Although my group and I knew our topic “Literacy” we were not sure on what the best approach for it should have been. The brainstorm process was a bit bizarre because it didn’t really get the group anywhere the first time. We talked for about three minutes in the group just started throwing out any ideas that were had that might work, or anything we thought would work. But the main challenge was just finding ways to keep adding to the project to make the core message stronger but I think all the other components of the project fell into place.

 

           

 

www.malaysiaandthegambia.weebly.com

The two countries I've researched are The Gambia, in Africa and Malaysia, in Southeast Asia. Both countries are going through their own specific problems but both are facing some trouble environmentally. I was assigned the country (The Gambia) when my teach had us working on researching elections in other countries. I was assigned Malaysia when my classmates and I were researching global goods, local costs in other countries. For the benchmark we were given the task of comparing the two countries we had and rating their sustainability and collapsibility. To see how collapsible the countries were we applied the "5 point framework" Jared Diamond discussed in his book. The 5 point framework is fairly simple. It consists of the countries Environmental Damage, Climate Change, Friendly Trade Partners, Hostile Neighbors, and its Society's Response. We then rated the countries on their collapsibility. 10 means they were in good standing and sustaining and 0 means they are in serious trouble. If I could change one thing about my project it would be the time I submitted it and the countries I'd chosen. Since I was assigned these wo countries it would have been exciting to look into two countries from the same regions that I didn't know as much about.

Quick look at my website: 

Our Public Service Announcement is about the amount of litter in SLA. There is a large amount of students in our school not disposing of their trash properly and leaving it on the ground. This image of litter in our school is visible all around, in the bathroom where food is sitting in the drain, the halls where kids just toss their waste and forget about it, and finally the café where the most trash is left on the floor to be ignored.

 

Litter seems so unimportant and we do not fully realize what we are doing when we drop something on the ground to forget about later. Litter is bad but upon doing more research we discovered even more ill effects then just it looking dirty. Litter is a fire hazard and attracts bugs, animals, and bacteria. This is important for the students at our school to know because they are not only creating an unclean environment but an unhealthy and unsafe one.

 

Our group took ideas from other PSA sites. Chelsea got the idea for a pledge from a sight about healthy food (http://www.fightbac.org/). Catherine and I got the idea for our posters from the images we saw online and how well they got the idea out. (http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/11/the-80-best-guerrilla-marketing-ideas-ive-ever-seen/) Tyler wanted to have a place where all our efforts could come together and thus our website (https://sites.google.com/a/scienceleadership.org/littering/?pli=1) was born. Chelsea wanted to make the Twitter account to get more people following our movement.

 

Catherine and I worked on the posters. We wanted them to be colorful and have pictures so that they were interesting. Unfortunately we could not make a hundred posters all by hand and in different colors but the more posters the better. Putting them up was full of strategy; the posters had to go in highly populated places but also in places where littering was the main problem. We put the posters on blank walls so that it popped more because it was the only thing there. The ballroom on the second floor was bombed with poster as was the lunchroom. While walking the stairwell you come face to face with the posters because they are at eye level (a selling strategy that is used by companies). The posters are also placed for relevance, if the poster is about fire then it will be near a fire extinguisher or the ones about boys producing more litter are in the boys bathroom.

 

This project is really important because it is a big problem in our school that does not seem important but is makes such a difference and is such a nuisance.