Other Student Posts

I read a post from Fuad's blog that was about Geoff's podcast. He expresses his opinion about Geoff's podcast. One thing about this post is...well let's just say that this post about his post is longer. He told me it was because he ran out of time, but, he could have done the rest of his post at home. On his other posts, he puts a lot of pictures, which is good.

Darren's post about paper bags was really random. The reason I chose to read his post was because I felt like reading a random post. He gives some interesting facts about paper bags and a little bit of history. I also like how he mentioned the Fandango paper bags, for no particular reason.

Billy did a blog post on Counter Strike Source (CSS) about his team and a match that they were going to play later on that day. I might have watched it if it was on his normal blog page, he has it on a blog that only has one post. I think that Billy should transfer this post to his other blog because then he would have more people view it.

Julian blogged about Halo 3 (betalicious). Unfortunately, I don't have an Xbox or Xbox 360 so I have nothing to be excited about. The game looks cool though. I like the video that he posted, it draws attention. Apparently, he can't wait until this game comes out.

Geoff Wong's Podcast

I listened to Geoff's podcast about a rapper named Jinn. He talked about his life, what he went through, where he's been, what he's done, etc. I thought this was an interesting podcast because I never even heard of this guy until Geoff made a podcast about him. Geoff has got me interested in seeing this guy rap. From what Geoff has talked about, he seems like an excellent rapper.

Lucas's Podcast

The first podcast I listened to was Lucas's. It was about the San Francisco Giants. His podcast was very similar to mine because I did a podcast about the Giants as well. We talked about things such as: Barry Bonds and his home runs, JT Snow and Pitchers. I like his podcast since it is like mine except his has a little bit different information than mine and vice-verse. Also because it's about the Giants and everyone knows the Giants rule.

Giants

The Giants are doing good this year. I didn't expect them to be as good as they're right now. Last year every time someone was talking about the Giants it was about how they should have won or how they suck and even how they were going to lose next game. I want to go to one of their games but my dad hasn't gotten tickets yet. We do have tickets to a game on July 24th but that's too far away. Barry Bonds is at home run #744. I think he will get past 755 this year. If he doesn't get it this year then he will never break the record because I heard that it was his last year in MLB. I use to know every single player on the Giants but now there are too many new people to know.

del.icio.us

I tagged a Sports page, the Giants homepage, and a South Park page. If someone wanted to know about the playoffs or any sport, you would click on my sports page. If you want to know when the Giants play, or anything about the Giants, you would click on my Giants page. If you wanted to watch South Park, you would click on my South Park page. These pages are nothing new, they've been around for awhile. These pages can help me because I can be up-to-date on all the latest news on sports while watching South Park, one of my favorite shows, at the same time. Since my computer didn't have the toolbar to tag pages, I had to download it. Then I did a search on del.icio.us. Next, I selected a link that I was interested in. Finally, I clicked the tag icon on my toolbar. I tagged these pages because I like sports and South Park is one of the greatest TV shows ever.

Podcasts

I have iTunes at home, and I never even knew that you could shop for podcasts, I thought you had to make your own. Browsing the Podcast Directory was okay, they didn't have much selection. I think it's cool that you can download stuff and upload it to your iPod. I chose VH1 Best Week Ever because sometimes I watch it on TV. I couldn't find anything better than that either since there wasn't much to choose from. It might be because I'm not looking hard enough.

Family Blog 2

Most of the time, my parents are working whenever I get home, so it's mostly my sister, my brother, and my little puppy. I would say a unique characteristic about my family would be that we explore and try everything. Whenever My dad and I go to the city he always makes detours and says "I want to check this out" or, "Oh this place is new let's go see", I don't mind either because he always ends up at some cool place. My dad is the comedian in the house, which is why my sister and I always hang around the house with him. My mom, well she does pretty much everything for us such as: chores, pays bills, buys food, cooks dinner, and all that stuff. My little brother is just annoying, I don't know a single person that hasn't said their young sister or brother is annoying. It's not all the time that he's annoying, sometimes he's good. My little puppy, he's just a hyper case, but he's still a cool dog. We sometimes have family nights, we do random stuff, board games maybe, it depends. I especially like our family gatherings on the holidays. Every holiday is celebrated at my house, all my relatives come over and we have a BBQ and just hang out.

Earth Day

Earth Day was a day that always made me think about how I contribute to the destruction of the environment and what I can do to help. Earth Day is mainly celebrated throughout elementary schools . It's a day that gives people awareness of our environment. Gaylord Nelson, who is the founder of Earth Day, believed that education was the key to changing people's attitudes about the environment and he devoted much of his time towards that challenge. I agree with Nelson because I never really cared until I learned about all these little things we could do to help and how our environment could drastically change.

Copyright

What is Copyright? Why do we have copyrighting?

Copyright is the law that protects someone’s work from being used without the author’s permission. We have it so the original person who created the idea or object gets credit for it and the money they deserve instead of someone ripping off their idea and selling it.

Compare the two songs in this copyright case. Do you think the following songs are targeted at different audiences?

The newer version is targeted to the younger audience.

Rap or Rock? Can you tell the difference? Go to the following website to play clips of Vanilla Ice and Queen / David
Vanilla Ice’s song is rap and Queen/David Bowie’s song is rock.

What does copyright law protect?
Copyright protects the original authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture.

Why are there copyright laws?
There are copyright laws because it protects some one's original idea from being copied and used unfairly.

What is fair use?
Fair use is using a limited amount of the work for educational purpose. Also, if it's non-profit, then it is okay.

Does fair use completely cover whatever she wants to do or are there limits to what is fair?
There are limits to the amount of use of some one's work that you can use.

Why can’t copyrighted materials be put on a school website?
People other than the students have access to that information.

How much stuff on the web is copyrighted? (Not much, a quarter, about half, etc?)
Almost everything is copyrighted on the web.

What is Creative Commons? What does it mean?
Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a "some rights reserved" copyright.

Fuzzy Logic

Fuzzy logic is reasoning that is more of a guess than exact information. I think fuzzy logic can be useful. I have no idea why they would want computers to think like humans because computers are smarter, and they give accurate information. Fuzzy Logic can have a huge affect on my life because machines such as a microwave will determine on its own on how long something should be heated. Other things like a washing machine can vary its speed and water levels, depending on the size of the load and how dirty the clothes are.

Family Blog

Family is the people you live with or people you are related to by blood. Family can also be someone who you care about. Most people consider their best friends as part of their family. My family circle would be my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, and my dog because those are the people/animal I live with. My family can be great but sometimes really annoying. My little brother is just plain annoying 24/7 and my sister is mean almost all the time. My dad is the fun one around the house and he let's us get away with a lot of things. There is a huge variety in my circle of family because we all have different personalities. My mom is serious, my dad is funny and laid back, my brother is hyper and annoying, my sister is boring, and I have no idea what I would be classified as. The quote about families that says, "Families evolve from a patchwork of possibilities" can have multiple meanings. I think it means that family generations overtime will change in a variety of ways.

What I learned

I learned from other people's projects that the Nintendo Wii is more popular than any other system out. I thought that the PS3 would've been the most popular but it turns out in every project I heard or saw, PS3 was the least favorable. I think that is because of the high cost for the PS3. From my own project, I learned what others thought about immigration and that the people that immigrate to the US come here for a better life or to feed their families.

Final Day of Project

My partner and I presented today and overall, I think it went well. As we played our podcast, people laughed at some of the things that were said about the issues of immigration and that just goes to show how serious this topic is and knowledge needs to be spread about these kinds of things. Mr Hinman even said, if you are making fun of immigrants, you are offending your ancestors or someone close to you. I think the project, although short, got people to think that immigration is no joke, these people are just trying to feed their families and live a better life. We exposed how our peers think about immigration. Hopefully, after today, everyone that listened to our podcast got something out of it because it wasn't meant as a joke and shouldn't be taken as one. What I enjoyed from this project was creating the podcast, it was fun to make edits and interview people. I just wish I would've put in music...

Change of Project

We decided that a movie would be too difficult to manage because of all the editing we would have had to do. We then were debating whether to do a Power Point presentation or a Podcast. Podcast was our final decision, it would make it easier for us to create a better overall project. In my opinion, I think this was a smarter choice for us because a video would be more complicated and a power point is boring.

Our Complete Survey

Here are our survey questions:

• What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of immigration?
• What is your opinion towards immigration?
• How should the US handle immigration?
• Do you think immigration is connected to terrorism?
• Do you have any relatives who have immigrated here illegally?
• What do you think about the border patrol? What about the volunteer citizens?
• Do you think that these immigration terms will change?
• Do you think that the US is dealing with immigration in the right way?
• How do you think that immigration will affect your future?
• What do you know about immigration?
• Do immigrants hurt or help the economy? How so?
  

Survey Questions

It's easy to think of question about our topic, immigration, because it's something that everyone knows about and everyone has various opinions/feelings towards this topic. We plan on asking people simple questions such as:

• What do you know about immigration?
  
• What is your opinion towards immigration?

We hope that these questions will get them thinking about immigration so we can go into some more difficult questions.

Writing the Treatment

Writing the treatment made us think about how we should approach our project and what the contents of the video will include. It also gave us an idea of how our project will look and what kind of materials or programs we will need to complete the project. It was difficult to think of ideas for this project so early in the process so at least it got us to think about our project. I'm not sure that everything that was put into the treatment will be exactly like our project but it will be similar.

Project Difficulties

First of all, the many blogs we have to do can be annoying but they are fairly easy to write. I think the video will be difficult as well because it's not as easy as people think it is since you have to edit the video, add audio/music and collaborate it into one whole video. Research can be difficult too because not all sources are reliable and we have to check our sources to make sure our information is correct. I also think being neutral will be hard in this project, I have various opinions about this topic that are very one-sided and it will be a challenge to put those opinions aside.
The difficulty of this project is that some people might not want to talk about immigration because it's a sore subject, the population is made up of immigrants, illegal or not. On one hand, immigration is a bad thing because it's costing the US a lot of money and on the other hand, people that are coming to America are coming because their life in their original country was unsanitary and they might have lived in poverty. There are many issues regarding immigration and it will be interesting to know what other people think in our community about immigration.

Topic Selection

My partner for this research project is Fuad. We've decided to go with immigration since it is a huge issue surrounding the US. We still don't know if we should do a Power Point presentation or make a film about. In my opinion, I think making a movie would be easier but on the other hand, a Power Point would be a solid presentation and we could pack it with good information. This project doesn't seem like it will be that difficult but then again, nothing seems difficult until you're actually doing it.