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 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 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. 

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.