On the first day of the project, we all assigned ourselves specific components of our project. The component I was responsible for was making a video, which would be the main element of the campaign. I'm pretty knowledgeable when it comes to iMovie, so I figured it would be the best thing for me to do. The first thing I did was let Siani and Loren finish finding statistics and putting together a brochure, which we planned to give out to people. The other component I helped with was the name of the campaign, which was "Homeless Faces of Philadelphia". Both Sammy and I tried to combine our ideas and keep in contact with the rest of the group, and update them on new ideas. My group and I got along pretty nicely, so there really were no disagreements or complications.

            My original idea for the video was to take my own photographs of the homeless in Philadelphia. I came to school equipped and ready with my camera to photograph throughout the city, I even came with a bag of change as a small token for the people who let me take a photograph of them. But as I set off on my journey, camera in hand, money in pocket, I was overwhelmed by the sadness of their desperation and felt that photographing them for my agenda felt inappropriate. Also, that my small token of a couple of dollars for this project was meaningless, so instead I chose to use available images to tell a story. But the deep impression that was made on that day will stay with me for a long time. 

Since I was not able to go through with my original plan, I decided to compile as many pictures as I could from the Internet, all of which were taken in Philadelphia (so it wasn’t completely random). When I got to around twenty-five, I thought it was best to make the campaign video around fifty seconds long, so it wouldn't be too overwhelming for people, since homelessness is a very serious subject to begin with. After that, I tried to find music that would be appropriate for the assignment. The first thought that came to mind, was The Pursuit of Happiness, which I think depicts the subject really well. The song that I found was actually called "Homeless" which was when Will Smith's character found out that he has not where to go with him and his son and it really renders the feeling of desperation. Once I had the pictures and music, I needed quotes or lines that could help me get our message across. Sammy and I worked together to put a few lines together, which I think represented our message very well.

Overall, the project went smoothly. My group collaborated pretty well, each of us knew what we had to do and we accomplished our goals, even if some of us didn't do what we were originally going to do. I believe our final project turned out to be really meaningful and effective (I know this because it made my Mom cry). 

First of all let me say that I really thought that this project would be simple to do considering that I had the topic for 2^nd quarter benchmark. Turns out I was wrong. I found it hard to put all the research that was previously collected into a website that would be shared with a great part of the community. It’s not that I have presented my work to a larger audience outside of SLA. It’s that this had to be professional because professionals would be viewing this.

Our goal with writing about Neighborhood High Schools was to inform people how they can help to encourage students to stay in school. How it is an important thing to have when it comes to getting a jobs and making more money a year than you would if you didn’t have a high school education.

The only other challenge for this project was making sure that out website could/would be viewed by people outside of SLA. The link to the website was posted on Twitter to Education Philly.  One the other hand a success we had was being able to come together to create a website and posters that would be distributed to those affected by neighborhood schools.

Overall, I think our attempt is going to be successful. We're knowledgeable and being high school student who fully want to graduate, we understand that having a high school education can open more opportunities than not having one. Like going to college.

First of all let me say that I really thought that this project would be simple to do considering that I had the topic for 2^nd quarter benchmark. Turns out I was wrong. I found it hard to put all the research that was previously collected into a website that would be shared with a great part of the community. It’s not that I have presented my work to a larger audience outside of SLA. It’s that this had to be professional because professionals would be viewing this.

Our goal with writing about Neighborhood High Schools was to inform people how they can help to encourage students to stay in school. How it is an important thing to have when it comes to getting a jobs and making more money a year than you would if you didn’t have a high school education.

The only other challenge for this project was making sure that out website could/would be viewed by people outside of SLA. The link to the website was posted on Twitter to Education Philly.  One the other hand a success we had was being able to come together to create a website and posters that would be distributed to those affected by neighborhood schools.

Overall, I think our attempt is going to be successful. We're knowledgeable and being high school student who fully want to graduate, we understand that having a high school education can open more opportunities than not having one. Like going to college.

Throughout this project I found the most difficult part to be not having enough time to really think of a more creative way to campaign my topic. Also I didn’t have the option of picking my own topic and group, so I just wanted to get the project done. I chose to create an iweb, by doing so I found it easy to organize my information and have a polished and clean-cut presentation. The theme to have the information in black and white makes the topic I am presenting more serious. I can’t have bright rainbow colors describing child abuse because it gives off the tone it is a joke. I think my group members worked well with the exception of a few people. Because they were assigned such important roles in the project it was frustrating because that meant people had to pick up the baggage they left.

            In the beginning we were going to target DHS as our audience. We then changed our audience to have more effectiveness for the topic. We decided to target adults, we figured that these issues start at home some the parents should be aware of the effects. Also we provided a page with the signs of child abuse so people know exactly how a person being affected behaves. We added a site tracker to our page so we can show how many people look at our site. My group members and I also posted our website link on twitter to spread the word. We found by doing that a lot of people even teenagers went onto the site to check it out. This project overall was very fasted paced and straight forward which was difficult but got the job done with some of my teammates.

Our group worked on a website to inform people about Child Abuse. We used a multitude of directions to come from that would help us get people to take the time to look at our website and just for people to understand the problem at hand. One portion of the project that I personally worked on was the media portion. We decided, as a group, that we should use images to show people what child abuse looked like on the outside so that they would take the initiative to go and find out what abuse does to children on the inside. So my job was to find images that I thought would have a hold on people after they saw them.

Challenges for us as a group was finding the time out side of class to communicate with each other and to focus while in class.  In class we’d get off task and start having a conversation about child abuse or an image I found or a statistic or something but in the end we found a way to incorporate the information form the conversation into our website. At other times we’d totally get off task and start talking about other things that had nothing to do with the project. Personal challenges I had was trying to find a sufficient amount of pictures that didn’t look cheesy or that had the effect that I wanted it to have on our viewers. Another personal challenge I had was being absent one of the days we had to work when we only had a few days to work on the project.

Successes that we had as a group was that when we all put our heads together we came up with really good ideas and found really good information to compile onto our website. We all brought some effective input to the table when we were brain storming on the project. We all also gave an equal amount of effort and support during the project as well as had a good time working with each other, in my opinion. Personal success that I had was pulling my own weight on the project and not asking for unnecessary help. Also, coming up with good ideas and pitching them to the group was a success I had. I also over came one of my weaknesses in group work; I wasn’t distant and I took the initiative in communicating with my group. 

         “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.