Passion & Creativity Presentation

Creativity Collaboration

Creativity & Photo Stories

Creativity

I was very excited about this weeks learning assignment because I love taking pictures. My boyfriend, featured in the video, complains because I am always taking photos, especially when they are of him. I like to be creative in that way, taking photos from different angles, drawing, etc. while he likes to take apart vehicles and figure out what is wrong with them. Creativity comes in different disguises, which I think relates to what Sir Ken said. My boyfriend is a good example of this, because while he did not the best when in regular school, when he was allowed to go to a technical school to do an automotive program, he excelled. This is similar to Sir Ken's story of Gillian Lynne who was a dancer and became very successful.

Photo Story

I chose to do my photo story on a hike that my boyfriend and I went on the other morning. The photos include the peaceful views, a shelter we found, and my boyfriend, some close up photos others not. I tried to vary the style of the photos. I do not have a lot of experience with making videos, but after watching the couple videos, I found it very easy to use. I liked that they had a lot of music to choose from and I was able to find one that I thought fit with my video which was even called "outdoor adventure". I found it a little tricky to move things around once the transitions were in there because it would change the length of the clips, but I was able to figure it out.

Boston Globe Photo Story

I looked at the World Aquatics Championship photo story on the Boston Globe's page. Their photos were obviously of much higher quality, but I aspire to one day be able to take photos like and learn how to edit them as well. There were a lot of photos and a lot of different views, and I thought this was a cool topic because the action shots come out really interesting. There are also some really funny faces made when they are competing, but the coolest part is when the water has not yet broken and they are in almost a bubble of water.

Audio Recording and Video Hosting

Music

Music is a really important piece of whatever it may be in, because as the video Don't Forget the Music says, it portrays the emotion of your video. The example video that he uses with different songs in the background, shows how the music can change the implications of the entire scene. There were also a lot of great resources for copyright free music that you can use and they were easy to download.

Audio Recording

I remember a long time ago, doing an assignment in chorus where we used garage band, which is the closet thing that I have used to Sountrap. It was not hard to learn, partially from the help of the video but also because it is fairly easy to use. I liked how it was easy to move clip around and change the length of them so that I could experiment and see what sounded best. I also thought that it was really helpful that had music clips in the app that you can use so you don't have to search the internet to find one. I did not have a microphone, so I was a little worried that the recording was not going to sound good, but it was actually loud and clear. 

Youtube

YouTube is one of the social medias that I have not explored much. When I want to find a tutorial on how to do something I go to YouTube, however I don't use it much other than that. I am glad that we are exploring this because I know that YouTube is actually a really big thing right now and I would like to learn more about how to be a part of it. I had no idea that you could post videos on YouTube privately, so that was something new I learned.

Jasmine reading a poem

Cloud Computing

Cloud Storage

When I started this week, I knew that cloud storage was a way of storing your files other than on your computer, however I did not know where they were. When I thought of the cloud, all I could think was files just floating around in the sky, but of course I knew this was not realistic. 

After reading the New York Times article, I learned that the files are stored on hard drives mostly owned by larger companies. The files can also move across different servers which makes for much more efficient computers. 

Safety

When I first hear about cloud storage, especially not knowing much about it, I thought that it was not a very safe way to keep my files. It seemed that if my files were out there on other people's hard rives that it would people more access to them. However, the article mentioned above says that your files are actually safer in the cloud. After thinking about it, it made sense because there are billions of other files that they are stored with, so the chances of your files being stolen or compromised are actually much smaller.

Google vs Microsoft

When comparing Google and Microsoft, I found that at first glance there are not that many differences between the two, even their logos are similar. I am much more familiar with Google's apps so it seemed a lot simpler and easier to me. I also thought that Google had a lot more apps to choose from, and some useful features in the editor that Microsoft didn't have. The most important one was the discover tool in Google Docs which allows you to search the internet right from your document. As the Ted Talk by Daniel Russell explains, we can get answers to any question so easily now, which is especially true with the discover tool. There are even tools like Google Scholar that help find articles that are reliable. Even thought Microsoft is perfectly capable of completing your everyday tasks, I would choose Google because of those tools, and because I like the color scheme and easy access from my google chrome browser. 

Blogs and Websites

My Learning

This week we worked on blog design and website platforms. I found this week really helpful as far as the blog aspect, and really interesting when it came to the website side. 

Blog

My blog really needed some upgrades and the articles that we read this week really helped me figure what to do as I will discuss later. I was not really sure what a blog should look like because this class is the first time I have done anything with blogs. While I was looking at the blogs that the articles gave as examples, specifically Fubiz the one I mentioned in my discussion, I noticed that they were a lot more complex than the blogs that we have for this class. One of the points about having a good blog was to make it simple so as not to distract from the content. Fubiz, and a lot of the other blogs did this while making it complicated enough to still captivate the eye. It showed me how different blogs can be from each other and how much more there is to learn. 

Websites

I always thought that a website was something that only professionals could have or people with a business. While I did discover that it was possible for anyone to make a website before now, I did not realize how easy it was. I think that it is a really good resource to be able to make a website as simple and easy as google sites makes it. Not everyone is gifted when it comes to technology, and making things like making a website easier, includes more people into the world of technology which is huge today.

My Blog

As I mentioned before, simplicity was mentioned a lot, specifically in the article "5 Keys To Make Your Business Blog Visually Awesome" at the very beginning. As I looked over my blog, I saw that while it was simple, it was almost too simple but not in the right ways. My posts were not broken up very well, with only a couple paragraphs and no headings, so I went through my posts and found where I thought headers and paragraphs should go so it is much easier to read now. 

The colors of my blog did not go well together and the article mentioned before says that colors of your blog set the tone for the reader. I decided to change my background to a soft blue mountain scene, and I changed the theme to a simple translucent white box, rather than the red that was there before. 

I was a little frustrated when it came to the fonts because I could not find how to change some of them. However, I did change the font of my titles and kept the normal text as simple as possible with a white background, for easy reading. 

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/jasmines-photography/home

Taking pictures is something that I really enjoy doing, especially since I spent too much money on a nice camera. This is why I decided to make my website about my photography. Overall I really like Google sites, especially because I am a beginner at website making. Everything was really simple and easy to figure out. At first I had no idea where to start so I decided to explore some photography websites for some inspiration. I wanted most of the focus to be on my photos so I did not put a lot of text in, but I did add some text boxes in order to explain some of the photos. I liked that it was really easy to move things around so that I could change things as I went along.

I had a lot of fun with this weeks activities and I was surprised at how these things that I though only certain people could do, are actually available to everyone and are easy and simple to use as well.