I’ve just discovered this really cool website that helps you create your own Choose Your Own Adventure stories!!!

It’ll be interesting to see how I can get my students online to share this resource with them but I’ll be back. Just playing around I wrote this little story as a starting point and practice tutorial for myself.

This opens up a lot of options for me as a writer and as a teacher. (Just brainstorming some ideas, I could have each link be written by a different student and we could write the whole story as a class and read it aloud later when it’s finished…)

Not to mention there are tons of interesting stories on this website and this cool looking “game” I don’t even know how you would play but I’ll be playing around here for awhile.

This assignment is to, using google translate, find something that does not translate well across languages and give some thought to it. Given the western theme of the class, I thought I might take it just a step further, and since many western saying are idioms, mix them up and see what I come out with after translating them to a few languages then back.  I used sayings from Legend of America.

• Don’t name a cow you plan to eat. > Armenian >Corsican > Chinese > Hawaiian >English =  I found ” ship.   (Ok, maybe that was too much.)
• There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, there never was a rider that couldn’t be throwed.  > Estonian >Esperanto > Irish >English =  It was not a horse that can not be climbed the occupier could not be throwed.  (Ok, now not enough)
• Never approach a bull from the front, a horse from the rear or a fool from any direction. > Belarussian > Hebrew > Maltese > Vietnamese > Korean > English = At the front never a good cow, horse back or a fool from any direction.
  
•  The biggest troublemaker you’ll probably ever have to deal with watches you shave his face in the mirror every morning.  >Afrikaans > Zulu > Arabic > Japanese > Chinese > English > Maybe they are difficult to deal with, every morning shave my face in the mirror of time.  (Mirror of time seems pretty metaphysical and philosophical, that quote might have even more wisdom now if you can access it.)

And now, for one grand finale, I shall find a substantially long saying and run it through every language in translate. I don’t know if it could get more jumbled than that first result, though.  Turns out it can.
“After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral: When you’re full of bull, keep your mouth shut. ” Turned into “Taurus dark Puma statement of value Beckett  Robert B and soul.”
I can see how a few of those words appeared… but most of that is nonsense. Natural languages are a pretty interesting and complex things. Maybe I need the time mirror to sort all this out.

In this assignment, you use Google Maps to tell a story, whether it is historical, or something you personally experienced. I used Google maps to show my visit to Seattle, WA, which I did to watch The International, a multi-million dollar tournament for Dota 2. This was 2 years ago, and at the time, it was very visceral. I didn’t think much about the trip itself, I lived the experience. Now that I reflect on the entire trip, I realize what a formative event it was. I was traveling to the complete other side of the country, alone, to stay with people I didn’t know, to go to an event I had no experience with. It was one of those early “adult” experiences that test your abilities and resourcefulness. I had to be completely self-reliant for about 10 days in a big, unfamiliar city. Luckily, it all turned out well. I had a great time at the event, it was nice to see Seattle, and I returned home having gained knowledge and experience. The link to my map is below, with a picture of the entire trip is below.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zLdP0l-sJino.k_-Aw1JEO3PU

I used the google maps online tool to create and share this story. It’s pretty self-explanatory: you add in your locations, and you can connect them with lines, or with routes like those you would use when driving somewhere. I didn’t want to give my exact address obviously, but I gave the general location. Now that I look on the visual feedback, it’s shocking to me what a distance I traveled, almost hitting the four corners of the US.

I created an email advertising for tourism in Tombstone, Arizona, a town I’ve used a couple times in past assignments. This assignment uses the website Vertical Response to create this ad, and actually allows you to send it out to people, but a) I didn’t have emails to send it to, and b) I don’t want to spam random people with an ad. Tombstone is home to a lot of history: it earned the reputation as a tough western town, and boomed for a while due to its silver mine. It almost became a ghost town, but tourism has revitalized it, sustain its modest population by telling newcomers its history. I couldn’t think of a better place to advertise, especially given the context of this course.

Since this was done through a website, the process was very easy. It had a wide arrangement of templates, so I just picked the one that fit the best. I got pictures off of Google, and highlighting what I thought as majors draws, attractions, or distinguishing factors. I created the ad in context of the town’s boom period, although it could have easily been made for current attraction.