Blog #11- Semester in review

Overall, my semester in this class has been successful. I enjoyed the class vibe and everyone around me wanted to succeed and they helped me if I ever needed help with something.

I knew coming into this class I was going to have to work very hard since it was a 400-level class and I am only a sophomore. Even though I was one of the younger students in the class, I was not going to let that stop me from being successful in the upperclassmen class.

I ended up doing pretty well in the class overall. I understood what was going on for the most part and tried as hard as I could on each assignment.

I also enjoyed learning about the content of the class because it was very relatable to what we go through in our daily lives with technology. I will take what we learned about in this class in my future with technology. I have noticed so much that goes in our lives with the technology that I never even thought about. Technology has taken over all of our lives and I have come to realize that it will only get worse from here on out because technology is advancing so much.

This class was very cool to learn about and I am glad I took the risk of taking a 400-level class. It was worth it in the end.

Blog #10- Meme Presentations

Our meme presentation was on the Yodeling Boy from Walmart.

He has recently become one of the most popular ‘memes’ in our generation of 2018. He has only been famous for about 2 months, but he has already been on Ellen, performed at Coachella, and many other big stages. Many celebrities are also putting his name out there, so we decided he was the perfect fit for our presentation.

We split up our presentation equally, but I was the person in charge to talk about the larger conversations, which are bigger socially and culturally.

I talked about his performances in various big name places and how that has made him so much popular. He was invited on the Ellen Show and that was what made him so huge. But, the start to the spread of his name came through Twitter and Instagram. Social media has definitely had a huge influence on his popularity in the last couple months. He is very popular for yodeling and that is not something people listen to every day, but now there are people that love watching his performances.

We all worked very hard on each part of our presentations and it turned out very well!

Blog #9- Research Project

My peers were very helpful when we got into our groups to talk about our research papers.

My topic is on how technology is personally being used on social media sites. Specifically,  I am going to be looking at social issues through media, especially cyberbullying. We see this issue everyday in our lives. It is always happening to someone and that is not fair. I believe this is due to the technological advances that are occurring in our day-to-day lives. It has become a very popular part to our culture. This is why there are so many issues with the younger generation and I want to research why this is causing so much harm into making technology seem worse than it really is.

My group members really helped me out with this. They told me to look at specific cyberbullying examples and try to tie it in to the research that I am doing in order to make it all valid information to make it a strong paper.

Being able to have specific examples within a research paper makes it so much stronger.

They also mentioned to have good citations and scholarly articles to back up my information.

My group members were very helpful with my research paper and I have a better understanding how to make sure it is a solid final paper.

Blog #6- Pictures for feature story/experience overall

For my feature story, the pictures were easy to capture since I knew exactly what I wanted to take pictures of. I love taking pictures, so this part of the feature story came very easy for me.

I liked the photos part of this part of the project because we were able to find specific pictures that resembled the topic we were talking about in other forms aside from audio and video.

Learning about the different kinds of photos to take was very interesting as well because I did not know that there were different kinds of shots that make or break specific ways that you view pictures.

Overall, my experience was very positive taking these photographs. I never really struggled while finding pictures because I knew exactly what I was looking for and I was able to take photos on campus, in my house, etc.

This entire project was so helpful with my major, especially because I learned SO MUCH that I will take forward with me in my future classes.

Blog #8- Audio/podcast for project

I enjoyed doing the audio portion of the project a lot. I am someone that does not stop talking, so doing the interviews was so fascinating and being able to edit my findings was so interesting.

I used the program, Audacity, to edit my audio for our NCT project and I thought it turned out pretty well. My interviews went by very smoothly and the editing process was okay for me. At first, I did not know how to properly edit on Audacity since it was my first time ever using the program. Eventually, I got the hang of it and finished my editing pretty quickly. In the end, my final product came out very well and I am proud of what I accomplished doing the audio portion.

For future assignments, I believe audio is my stronger point vs. doing videos since Audacity was easier for me to understand. I am very glad we had to use two completely different programs for this project because I have learned so much and I cannot wait to learn more with working on projects like this in the future!

Blog #7- My videos for project

Doing this project was definitely something that I was not familiar with, since I have never had experience working with Premiere Pro for the video portion of our project.

I recorded all of my interviews on my cell phone and that part was pretty easy for me, since I am comfortable with interviewing my peers.  After I recorded all of my interviews, I uploaded them to my computer then eventually put them into Premiere Pro.

Once the videos were in Premiere Pro, I just edited them down to the 2 minute maximum time limit. At this point in the process of the project, I was pretty confident with what I had made for my video portion of the project.

My only issue with the video portion was exporting it to send to Dr. Wachanga. I have never worked with Premiere Pro and I did not know the specific requirements in order to export the video properly. Exporting the final product was the main struggle that I encountered throughout the project process.

Overall, I thought this project was very helpful for future assignments in the journalism area. Being able to work with video is very important and once you have the basics down, it will pay off in the end. This was a very good experience for a project and I will only have more experience from here on out.