One of My Favorite People

When I saw that there was a 3-star assignment in which I could highlight one of my favorite people in my life, I knew I wanted to do this assignment. It took me about 2.5 seconds to decide that I would make a video about my mom.

So… who doesn’t love their mom? I for one, do!

Unfortunately, in June of 2009, I lost my mom after her two-month battle with cancer. I could write a book on how much I hate cancer. However, for the first twelve amazing, fun, hilarious, and adventurous years of my life, I had my amazing, fun, hilarious, and adventurous mom to walk along beside me. She was my everything. She taught me everything I know, seriously. One morning, I woke up and I wanted scrambled eggs for breakfast. She told me that it was time for me to learn how to cook them (even though, guys, my mom made the best scrambled eggs). I got a piece of paper out and wrote down the “recipe” so that I could make my own eggs. I don’t have this anymore but it was something like “1. Crack eggs in bowl 2. Whisk eggs 3. Pour milk in the eggs   4. Put butter in a pan and turn on medium heat 5. Pour eggs into pan 6. Stir the eggs around the pan until cooked.” As an only child, my mom babied me, and I loved it! She loved to pick out my outfits for the day until I was in second or third grade. She was always at every school play, festival, etc. Not only was she a fun person, she was protective, spiritual, and brave. She could do everything and anything she put her mind to. For one thing, she had me completely naturally. No epidural, no nothing. One thing that she always tried to get me to do was sports. I hate sports. She was the most athletic woman I knew. She signed me up for tennis, basketball, soccer, dance, gymnastics, field hockey, volleyball, golf, and horseback riding. As she may have expected (I don’t know, though), none of them stuck. I don’t even like going to the gym to run on an elliptical all that much to be honest. However, she always did things with my best interest in mind. She took care of everyone else first, before taking care of herself. She had to deal with me as a little girl who was a picky eater, stubborn, and the list goes on, she had to deal with our dog, Molly, who liked to eat everything in her path, and more! My dad was there to help too, however, my mom was who I spent most of my time with due to my dad’s work schedule!

Her contagious laugh and the love that she gave to everyone and everything, including her garden,  are just two of the hundreds of traits that she had. Nothing can ever come close to the bond I had and continue to have with mom, even though she isn’t physically here with me. I do now have a stepmother, whom I love very, very much. I feel as though my mom pulled some strings up in heaven to send her to my dad and me. She shares many similarities with my mom.

Lastly, anytime you hear the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” my mom is the first person I think about. I can tell you more about that later! ?

Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge

A quick and silly assignment I thought I’d do is the Valentine’s Day Challenge. I downloaded the image from flickr and in Photoshop used the text tool to type in my caption.

Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge DS106

Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge DS106

 

 

 

 

It’s official, this class is moving WAY to fast

Every week that goes by, I think OMG it’s really been another week and I’ve learned so much.  I think everyone can agree with me that we learn so many skills in this class, I absolutely love it! So week 6 is over.. I think every sunday I’ll be surprise that yet another week has gone by.  This week was filled with 4 daily creates, design safari and the contribution to the assignment page3, and 15 stars worth of design assignments!

Daily Creates

My 4 daily creates for the week are bellow, you can also click the link for more detail, whatever tickles your belly!

Empty

Personal font

The daily assignments this week really allowed me to get creative.  I loved the assignment about creating a floor plan about the house we grew up in.  This really made me think about my childhood and all of the amazing times I had, and also it reminded me of how amazing my family is, and how far we’ve come from where we lived in Peru to where we are now.

My Design Blitz

Learning about design was new for me.  I did not know that there were so many different components to a picture, or an advertisement or anything.  I guess I never really broke down the picture into individual elements.  I learned the importance of how color sets the mood, of how typography can use words to send a more meaningful message than a picture could, and how dominance and unity can really bring out the beauty in a picture.

Unity

Unity

This picture shows unity by combining the different elements that make the ocean into something that is whole.

Dominance

Dominance

Not only is a male peacock the definition of dominance, but I think that the colors in the picture really dominate the picture, and the bright blue body is really puts all the colors together.

Typography

Typography

Carlo’s Bakery has a way with words!  The typography they used in the image created such a visual for me.  I really did fall in love with one bite.

Color

Color

The color used in this bottle totally creates the image of mellowness for me.  I think that the black and white picture really tie everything together.

My pictures can also be found on the assignment documentt.

Design assignments

Assignment 1 / 3 stars

NemoandMEEE

I decided to Photoshop myself into a new poster.  I had to mess around with Photoshop for a while in order to figure out how to actually crop a picture by the figure rather than cropping straight lines across the image.  I thought it was really cool when I saw the end result.

Assignment 2 / 2 stars

For this assignment we had to use a word that represented the word in a way.  We couldn’t use color or anything but the word.  I decided to write the word backwards, backwards.  I thought it was pretty ironic!

Slide1

Assignment 3 / 4 stars

This assignment was a lot of hard work.  I decided to do 4 stars in order to challenge myself a little bit.  I wrote elements that represented me and chose a background that also shows my love for the ocean.  It was an interesting assignment because I used both Photoshop and Powerpoint to create this and crop and make different shapes, but it was also challenging to pick things that represent me!

Slide1

Assignment 4 /2 stars.

This is my poster for my radio show.  I used spooky font to go with the theme, and chose a picture of Autumn to show what our show is about.  We are doing a spooky/autumn theme.  I also discuss on my blog my contribution to what I’ll be doing for my show.  I can’t wait until our radio show is done so all of our hard work can show!

radioshow

Assignment 5 / 2 stars

I decided to make myself a cartoon!  Photoshop was a great aid in this, but I had to do a lot of work in order to get my end result looking just how I wanted it to look!

Cartoon me

Assignment 6/ 2 stars

This assignment was about creating a Valentines day card.  I love the one I created.  I put a lot of work into it, and I love the quote that goes with the heart!

Slide1

This week I definitely experimented with Photoshop so much more!!  I learned how to do so many things including how to crop a picture and inserted it on another one.  I knew how to do that, but I didn’t know how to crop the picture to the frame I wanted it.  Anytime I tried cropping it drew a little box around the picture and asked me to fit whatever I wanted into the picture  to chop of the rest, but that wasn’t going to work for me.  I had to do a little research and finally figured out how to delete the excess and actually give the picture the frame I wanted.  Also, my iPhone came to the rescue again, maybe it’s time to actually fix my camera or maybe even get a new one.

This week again taught me a lot about photography, art, and anything visual really.  Design is a big part of anything visual and it’s something I had taken for granted.  I really enjoyed this week.  I mention this on EVERY weekly summary but i really enjoy the things I’m learning in this class and every week I look forward to see what new skills I’ll acquire!

Who is Anapaula?

One of the design assigments I chose was What’s inside of me?  This assigment is worth 4 stars, and I chose to do it because sharing the different components of what makes me as a person was very important to me.  People should know the different things in my life that matter the most, and it also gives them more of an insight of who I am besides what they read in my blog.

Slide1

To do this assignment I mixed powerpoint with Photoshop.  I created different bubbles to represent the important things in my life.  This assignment really made me put things in perspective.  I had to think about what were the most important things in my life, and also how each individual component make me the person I am today.

My Ohana

This design assignment was one that I was struggling with earlier in the week. I was trying to use Paint to place text over the image, but I couldn’t figure it out and it was really frustrating. So in order to try and figure things out, I was looking at a lot of examples of the work other people were doing. I was looking for people describing HOW they did things so I could try what they were doing and see how that worked for me.

I saw that PicMonkey was mentioned a few times so I decided to give that a try! It turns out that it worked really easily for me and I was really happy with it! It was very simple and easy to use and I really like the effect I had. I looked at the other people’s works who submitted this assignment, and they all kinda tended to use pictures with their friends, showing them having a good time. So I thought about it and decided to use this one picture of my family from this Easter that I really liked. We’re all being silly (really only me) and I love it!

So I uploaded it to PicMonkey, used the “Dusk” effect to give it kind of a cool effect and added some text to it. I wanted to have something with family in it like “Family Fun” but decided on “Ohana Means Family” just because! :) So here is my album cover, for my  family, which I think would consist of folks songs that you could sing and harmonize with your family!

Family Band

3 STARS

TOTAL STARS: 9/15

 

Skipping a beat

Week six we got introduced to design!  We had to choose different design assignments, and I choose to do Valentine’s Alternative!  This assignment was worth 2 stars, and it was a little bit more complex than I had originally anticipated.  I messed around with Photoshop, which I had never done before so that’s where the challenge came in.  It took me a little bit to figure out what to do, and what each individual tool was for.  I was a little difficult to figure out how to have a background image, and put some more on top as well as figuring out how to crop my heart picture to make it fix!

Slide1

Valentines day is the of love, and I wanted to express that by putting a picture of a heart on my card.  I feel that having a real heart is more meaningful, specially because it went with my quote.  ”You give me premature ventricular contractions” is basically scientific talk for “you make my heart skip a beat.”  When I first heard that quote in a movie called No Strings Attached  I absolutely loved and I was waiting for the perfect opportunity to say it and I guess this is it!

Falling in Love…..with Laundry

My official experience with the reality-altering course that is ds106 may be over, but my love for creation has not diminished in the least. If you’ve ever let your mind wander while laboring through some menial task such as weeding the garden, scrapping paint, or doing laundry, then you’ll understand where my concept for this video comes from. The idea is to create a juxtaposition between the emotions typically felt during a common shared experience, in this case doing laundry, and attempt to evoke an emotion or mood with music that’s discordant to the actual experience.

As a part of all learners’ educational experiences, they are asked repeatedly to compare and contrast moods, settings, events, characters, and emotions. Not just in language arts, but increasingly so in other content areas. With the adoption of the Common Core Standards, the ability for students to be able to construct and articulate an argument in support of or against a given topic using a wide range of media makes it all that much more important that students can think emotionally, as well as logically. When trying to frame a story, which is at the heart of any argument or viewpoint, the ability of a learner to use emotions and imagination is just as paramount as their ability to effectively contrast their viewpoints from another’s using logic. Pathos plays a role in the construction of any type of media, story, or argument, and is most likely one of the most useful “soft skills” that learners can develop while in school, and one that has become quite easy to accomplish in the classroom through technology.

The ability to piece together a short video is ridiculously easy today; a $100 handheld HD video recorder, iMovie, and a cheap miniature tripod are all that I needed to create this video. There’s hardly an excuse anymore not to have students making their own videos to express themselves and their learning, but as educators we must still ask them to tell stories with emotion, with logic, and be able to articulate how a story or an effective argument makes a person “feel”.

Teacher Challenge!

A good challenge for any teacher this coming school year, regardless of content area, would be to ask your students to take a chore or other simple task and try to elicit some type of mood or feeling using music, video, and still images that’s counterintuitive to the chore or task. Have them prepare some brief notes as to why and how their creation juxtaposes the mood of the original chore, and have other students be prepared to challenge their statements (in a positive way). Examine in which ways their piece of art is both complimentary and discordant to the task being accomplished, and then challenge them to think differently about the school work ahead of them this year, and what sort of story they want to tell about their learning.