My group completed and had a prosperous final product, before we started we all listed our weaknesses and our strengths and we all split up into different categories for the project. My specific part was the initial planning, of what was going to happen, I was the person who brain-stormed and then would present what I thought was a good idea to the group. For this project I could be considered the person who worked on the Design aspect on the rubric that was given to us.

            The challenges that I believe my group faced was that we had little time to work on the project with all the other projects we had in other classes. We did communicate well and we planned out what our video was going to be, I made the storyboard, Terrance edited it, and then Becca and Terrance made a short video of what we had done on the storyboard. We also tried to implement different ideas around the video, for example we wanted to have a Facebook group related to the video so that people could spread the word and help track how many followers we have. We also had this idea where we would have all the same video and links to them in different places and all the links were all different and we would be able to track how people neglected or watched, how in some places there is more focus than others, a lot like law enforcement. This was one of our challenges was to implement our ideas while working on multiple things such as Math and NHD projects.

            Our biggest success was the background research and working together on the Google document, and sharing links and ideas on how we could make our video better and share statistics. Our biggest success was our video because we worked it out who was doing what and we met our self-induced deadlines, but what would have made our project an A were the little things such as the ideas mentioned before. In all honesty I don’t know what our final product that was implemented into society looked like because I went away on vacation, so what I could have done better was communicate with them on the final day of the project.

Throughout this project, I had some challenges, but I also had some cool points. First and foremost, it wasn’t hard for me to do more research on my topic. I was able to have a head start on this project s I was able to help my group mates get a little background check on this topic. That was part of the cool points. I had no problems with my group mates. Everyone knew how to own up to their responsibilities. There were wasn’t one time where either of us had to babysit each other. Our responsibilities were very simple and it didn’t take a lot of time to do so. We came up with this idea of making a video and it never happened because we weren’t able to or something happened. I really wanted t make that video come to life, and I couldn’t make it happen. It really upset me.

My ending piece was not something that I was proud of. The reason why I wasn’t proud of my final piece was because it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. We should have taken the time out of our day to do some interviews, make a video, and check out our final piece before we turned it in. When I saw Cecelia’s group presented their project, I was stunned. It looked so legitimate and when she presented her campaign, I felt the pity for homeless people. And I thought that was pretty awesome because they were able to give the audience an emotion. I think that if you’re able to give the audience an emotion, then your campaign is working.

I felt like my final piece did not offer that. I feel like I didn’t put in so much effort when I should of. I should of spread around the word around and make it happen. All I thought about was “get this project done.” I didn’t think of it as in “this is actually going viral and we need to stop this.” I guess my mindset was more focused on spring break. If I could do this campaign again, I would take my time and put in more effort than I did before. I would actually check my final piece before it got turned in. The only thing was that I wasn’t in charge of putting everything together. Maybe next time, I should be in charge of that job.

Our project was about school district funding it was done by Joe w, Mathew Walker, Vincent Russell and myself. We sort of did the project as a group but Joe and I did the website and Mathew and Vincent did the video but we turned it in as one big project.

One of the things that my group could not come up with was what part of the work each person was doing. First Vincent and I were suppose to do the video and the other two work on the website than later on Mathew said that he did not want to do the website and he wanted to do the video with Vincent. I did not know how to make a website so I did not want to make a website either but for some reason I decided at the end to do the website. Thank god Joe had a little experience with weeby.com (website) so him and I were able to work on the site and we tried to have everything on it.

Our biggest problem was collaboration I feel like as a group we really didn’t collaboration a lot. Some time we will tell each person what they needed to do before the next day and when we get together again and when we ask did anyone do everything they were support to do, some of us be confuse and act like we did not know what were suppose to do. There was one time when Vincent and I try to get every one on the good doc and the others did not feel like getting on or they were to busy with other works.

I think we should have done our project three days before it was due so in that will we could have tell if people our really plying attention to it or not and is it effective or not. It was really hard to figure out if people will actually view our website

With all projects come challenges and easy points. So, I’d say our group did a fairly decent job. When we first got our topic we told each other what our weaknesses are and our strengths, and planed accordingly. As a group we were split on what medium to use for our project. Eventually decided on using both a video and a website. We then split our group into smaller groups; Mabintu and Joe working on the website while Mat and I work on the video. Collaboratively we all gathered resources to put on both medias and shared the google doc so we could have access to it. 

A challenge for me was finding videos that go along with the facts. It was easy finding out what had been cut but for a video you need someone to say it, to be more believable. Also, I thought communication with in our group was a challenge since some people would be on at times and other not, but we over came that. 

I think our success was knowing what angle we wanted people to view the topic as. It is such a complex and broad problem to talk about so we ended up showing more about the struggles that the district is facing. Not so much that its their fault but its a system that we’re apart of and can improve.

All in all, I think our project was pretty decent. We’ll start getting the word out there this spring break to see the impact, if any, it has. Hopefully there will be. And continue on from there.

For our group’s projects, there were plenty of downfalls but there were also some successes along the way. For example, when we first started planning what we were going to do for our project, everything sounded as if it was going to go well. In the beginning, we wanted to first go around the city and pay homeless people to do an interview with us but we then seen how that could be a problem beings though some homeless people may feel offended to the idea. We then thought of another idea, which was to visit homeless shelters and food distributions. When we visited one of the homeless shelters, we thought it was a hospice because of the sign in the window. We asked one of the few guys who were coming in and out of the building what exactly was the building for and who exactly lived there and the man had said it were for homeless men who were trying to work their way out of homeless. We thought that connected to our slogan since our slogan was  “Homeless not Hopeless”. We then wanted to set up something there so that we could buy them something to eat in exchange for interview questions. The director agreed to let us make sandwiches for them while we interview them and he gave us a set time. Beings though NHD took longer then we expected, we missed the time that the Director told us to come and he was not answering his phone. Another issue we faced was that we wanted to buy stickers with our slogan on it but we couldn’t purchase them in time so we brought posters from staples instead. One of the successes in this project was our fundraising bake sale. We wanted to raise money so that we could buy food for the homeless people who we interviewed and my group nearly sold everything and made a lot of money from it. In the end, our group managed to get interviews with homeless people. Ways that we got our issue out to people in Philadelphia was that we made posters with our slogans on it, both for the city and to put around in SLA as well. Also, we made a website explaining what our organization is and how to help and we also put the stories of the homeless people on the website as well.  

            On of the biggest challenges we had as a group was that it would be pointless to do something in the school because our school already has a high graduation rate. This meant that no mater what we did and how we presented the information we would have to reach out to people outside of the school. This is what led us to choosing a web site because it is easier to get a web site to people we don’t know. Another one of our ongoing challenges as a group is that it was hard for us to agree on something because all of us are very opinionated. After some time I stopped caring about how we made the web site and what it looks like because I was tired of arguing over a color.

One thing that was nice was that I had this topic before so we had all of the previous research. This helped because we did not have to look for the information we needed for the project. We only had to show the current information in a different way. Also because I already knew about the current situation it was easier to know what we would need to look at, like attendance.

            Once we decided to do a web site we had to decide what each person would do. Over all everyone worked on their parts individually and put it together once everything was done. I worked mostly on the statistics because I felt confident in what statistics were the most important. Over all I am glad that the project is finished and hope that the web site will reach people who are at risk of dropping out.   

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.