5-2-12

Everyday you learn something new. I am very excited for our new project. We are making a horror/comedy movie. It will probably be like a spoof of Paranormal activity. It seems like it will be really fun, and the end product will be really amazing, but we don't have a lot of time to do it. In 2 weeks we have to create a story and script, get a cast, do all of the filming, and then all of the editing. It's going to be a really great project though!
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 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-30-12

Everyday you learn something new.

Reflection                                                                            Zephyr Smith

I am very proud to say that we finally finished our graffiti intervention in time for the celebration. I think it was very successful, but there is a lot more to this project then just the cleanup. We have done so much, not all of it was perfectly efficient, but it was very successful.

We began this project a few months ago. We started off very slow, spending most of our time in class talking about what we were going to do but not really doing it. Those first few weeks were spent finding an idea, thinking about it, changing it, and then changing it back to the way we had first thought of it. We didn’t really act we just planned. It ran us way behind schedule for the whole duration of the project. The whole time it seemed like we were a week behind everyone else. We began the process of building our website, designing a flier, and meeting our contact. We caught back up, but then our meeting with our contact gave us a huge change in our project. All along we had been working with the wrong idea. Instead of working against graffiti we should have been working with art. We had to reverse a lot of previous work. It was hard but it made our project better in the end. From there we had to add finishing touches to our poster and website. We then planned our cleanup. Unfortunately we had to reschedule several times due to communications issues. We finally had our clean up witch went very well.

Our project seemed very good overall. We had a very successful clean up and when we finished we all felt as if we had done something. To me we made a huge difference in  our community, witch was the goal of our projects. I also learned how to manage people in a group, witch is probably a pretty valuable life skill. We educated the community as well as helping it. In the end it was a very successful project.

"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-23-12

Everyday you learn something new. Our project this weekend ended badly again. I forgot to get the supplies on Thursday and on Sunday I went to get them and the office was closed.  I had to cancel the whole cleanup in a matter of around 3 hours, and 2 people didn't receive their notification. As we've been told, huge communication breakdown, and since I was getting the supplies and in charge of communication, my fault. We fixed our communication problem and we have gotten the supplies, so there is hopefully nothing else that can go wrong this time. Our reschedule is for this Sunday, and we have to get the whole cleanup and everything related to it on the presentation board very quickly. I have no idea how we plan to do that. We also had to scrap our video as it is now too late to do this. Right now I honestly have a very negative feeling for how this whole project went, Which I will express in future blogs and my reflection.
 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-19-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today one of our group members had an interesting experience that he shared with us. He had a vision of a run down church and drew it on a piece of paper and showed us. I'm not sure what is with the world and people having strange visions, I heard a story recently about a young child having a similar problem. It seems like they are all based around religion as well. Maybe its all the hormones in our food. I'm glad I don't have this problem. I do seriously wonder why people have this. It dosnt make any sense scientifically. So far our group is making a lot of good progress. Ill have a more in depth update tommorow.  

"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-17-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today I thought about what Mrs Schwarting had talked about, the relationship between 7th and 8th graders. It seems accurate and present in my group. The 2 8th graders took charge of the group and the 7th graders followed. The 7th graders also seemed as if they didnt work as hard and complained more. I think there are some of them who are capable of leading the group, but if others were in charge we would have alot of problems. Even so I feel as if I ended up in charge of my group, even though we voted for Zach as the leader. I think we should try something to put the 7th graders in charge, perhaps activities after the projects are finished.
"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-13-11

Everyday you learn something new. Today was a bit shocking and a bit disappointing for our group. We had scheduled our clean up for this weekend on Saturday, but we found out it would have to be rescheduled because the teachers have to be there and all of our group members have to be there. I guess it all makes sense, but I feel like I might not be doing as much of a good job as I thought I would be. Between all the redoing of work and our whole event breakdown I feel like we are falling behind. I am really hoping we will at least manage to get everything done on time.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-11-12

Everyday you learn something new. Throughout my whole life I have never been much of a magazine person. I like many people have a smart phone, and in the non-default browser that I use I found a special section for online magazines. The first time I used it I figured it would be a bit dumb and pointless, the way I felt about magazines at the time. It turns out I was completely wrong. I like technology stuff and in the webzines I found several websites with all kinds of articles that I actually cared about and wanted to read. The main 3 were Lifehacker, Techcrunch and Wired. Eventually the webzine function was removed from the browser app due to a security issue, witch I ironically found out about through those webzines. It would be really great (at least to me) if things like that made it to print and were sitting in lobbies. I wouldn't have to read Time Magazine all the time. At least I finally found a magazine style form of media that I actually want to read.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-9-12

Everyday you learn something new. Our group has finally had our meeting with our contact, Terry Laaker. He gave us a lot of information that was very intriguing and helpful. He told us a lot about the people who tag, how they are mostly just artist trying to get their work out and many of them are young. He told us about the art of graffiti, and the history. From all the information we gathered from him we have a lot more to work with now, but it also appears we have taken the wrong approach. We should have worked more towards the idea of art and legal graffiti, instead of pushing anti graffiti. Its good that we have more information and a better understanding now, but we have to undo a lot of what we've done, starting with our website. At least we have been given more time on the project to do so. It also gives us more time to start creating a great presentation. The end of April will come up before we know it, so we need to get this done soon.
 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-4-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today in Language Arts we got back our research papers. I've been a bit excited/anxious, even though I had pretty much forgot about that paper. I got a 12.5 out of 16. At first glance that seemed really bad, considering it was around a C, but I feel a bit better after understanding that this is a "rough rough" draft, and that I have done well compared to my peers, and out of those who I read, I though they were good. Some of the things that are noted in the edits/revisions on my paper I do not nessecarily agree with, but I don't know everything, and will probably find that what I think is wrong. I do think that the APA template didn't help, because even though I used it along with many people I know, our average grade was probably barley more than a 2 out of 4. I also think that we were led away from good formatting (based on the presentation) by BibMe. The BibMe formatting was much different from the APA formatting in the presentation. I am a bit excited to go over my paper with the teachers, but also a bit nervous because I already know we will disagree about a lot of things.  

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

4-3-12

Everyday you learn something new. Things with my group are still going extremely well. Everything has fallen into place. Our website, www.evograffiti.weebly.com is all written, we just need to finish putting up our research paper. I have talked to Terry Laaker and we are meeting on Thursday. I have also spoken with Lydia Odem and handled our supplies and clean up date schedule. The flyer has been designed. We do still need to post it though. We also need to get our video going if we are still going to do it. Next week should be a lot of work our presentation. I'm glad to see that we went from being the group that seemed a little behind to being almost done.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-30-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today was a very good day for our group and project. We contacted the City Of Phoenix to get approval on our clean up, and found out that they were going to give us materials as well. This is great because we can now assign the people who were in charge of materials to other tasks. With this new amount of resources things should come together pretty quickly. I am very excited to see what will happen next week once things are up and running after the weekend. We have several communication actions to make on Monday so it should be an efficient day. I can wait to see how all f this goes.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-28-12

Everyday you learn something new. It seems that our project is coming together pretty well. Everything iss up and running its mostly just making this better that we still need to do. We d need to start the video soon, but I think that we will have that covered next week. I think we need some more work done on the actual clean up dates though. It seems to be the one unknown. The awareness is going well, but the actual clean up is not moving forward at all. Hopefully we can get that going next week too.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-26-12 (Makeup for 3-16-12)

Everyday you learn something new. I guess since I'm writing this right after spring break I should probably blog about it. I did a lot of camping over the break witch was really fun. I rediscovered my love for it, and thought about why I hadn't gone in so long. It was mainly due to the fact that I had become very busy and finances hadn't permitted until this last week. It's pretty interesting thinking about how society and human life moves so fast. For me It's nice to slow down, but I think a lot about all the things I want to do. I wonder if other people experience this too. I also thought about why people don't like camping, as I had been talking to a friend who didn't. Maybe it is just because people are too stuck to their electronics and comfortable luxuries.  
 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-14-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today was a very constructive day in Language Arts for both myself and my group. I have come up with a few ideas for my "spreading the word". As I've said before I plan to make and distribute photos, and create a website. I also want to make a video to put on Youtube and use the Kony style of spreading the video through social media. My group made a few big decision too, to scrap our wall idea. We decided it was a bit improbable with our resources and that we had not done enough research to continue with it. I think it was a wise decision, because I feel that the idea is personally very useless and unsafe, as well as difficult to impossible for us to do with the limits we've been given.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-12-12

Everyday you learn something new. Now that we are pretty close to being finished with Tuesdays With Morrie I thought I might share my opinion compared to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I have so far liked Tuesdays With Morrie a lot more. I remember thinking that The The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was slow, but Tuesdays With Morrie is also slow, and I like it. I find it interesting how there are so many flashbacks (convenient for literary elements). I think it has a similar parallel plot element with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I am finding that Tuesdays With Morrie seems very short. When doing the reading for each section it seems like you don't read very long and there are only 4 sections. It's unfortunate that were going to be done soon.
 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-9-12

Everyday you learn something new. Lately I have become very worried about a back injury that I have. Last season in football I hurt my back and had to stop playing. It was serious enough that I took a season off and had to let it rest several months. I had to do stretches several times a day for it. I recently started playing football again and now I am starting to feel it hurt again. The whole thing is beginning to make me worried that I will never be able to play again. I don't consider football the most important thing ever, but I hate the thought of not being able to play. I have been doing it for years, and hoped to be doing it for several more years. I hope this all works out in my favor and I can start playing again without worrying.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-7-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today we were able to send our first email to our projected group partner. As our communication person I hope to see a response soon. I have been assigned with making posters and presentations for our group. I am pretty excited about that since I do actually enjoy doing things like that. I want to start soon but I think our project needs to develop more first. I can make base creations for our posters/presentations though. I have also determined that it might be nessecary to make a website for educational/presentation purposes.

"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

3-5-12

Everyday you learn something new.Now that our I've finished my research paper I have started thinking about our group project. Since my job is communications I have been trying to figure out who our contact is and how that should work. I have ideas, and I favor the Neighborhood Services Department people out of all the possible contacts we have found, but I can't make decisions without consulting my group. I was thinking about creating a website for us, but it might not actually be necessary. I want to create a Skype account, but that might not be necessary either if our contacts don use/have it. I think we need to get some group time in class, like a whole period, so we can all make these decisions together and everyone will know what to do next.

"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

2-29-12

Everyday you learn something new. Today we watched a video about a man and his photo editing. As I said in class, there was a definite relationship in the art of the 2 projects, the photos and our graffiti. I think that the differences are more important though, because the pictures are legal art, but graffiti is not. I read a whole article today about how graffiti can be justified, at http://www.graffiti.org/faq/damico_a_legal_and_economic_analysis_of_graffiti.pdf. I think that people need to find a way to make their graffiti somewhere other than walls. Could the same thing be done on paper? I dont even embrace the idea of legal graffiti walls, because it seems dangerous to get a huge group of people that might be in gangs together. I know my project is more about cleaning up graffiti, but in our awarness i think we should do something to recommend alternatives. 

"Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown

2-27-12

Everyday you learn something new. My research has been going pretty well so far. I have found may sites by individual cities about graffiti, most of witch are .gov. I have also found many .org sites that outline financial effects of graffiti as well. There are a few .com articles that I hope to use, they are from sources that I find reputable, like the New York Times, but I still have to get approval for them first. In my research I found a few articles about graffiti internationally, in cities like Athens. I cant spoil the surprise, but I find it very interesting. I also found an article while looking for more information about the 2004 Olympic Stadium in Athens. Apparently after building the stadium and holding the Olympics, the stadium was abandon. It is now destroyed, and there are many refugees and gipsies living in the remains. It's terrible to see a country build something so great to hold the biggest sporting event in the world, then leave it to rot.

 "Shoot for the Moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the Stars" - Les Brown