Working on the Site

So, I found a website maker called SynthaSite and made a website called "The Lily Pad". It's not an actual website yet because I'm still working on it, but it seems to be coming out great so far. I made a group on Facebook where people can upload pictures to me. My email is also up there for people who wish to send me poems and/or short stories. So far two people have sent me poems and three (four including myself) have given me many photographs which I have uploaded.

What I'm also thinking about doing is adding an article a week about a modern day artist/writer or an event that involves art. I'm having a lot of trouble finding people/events to write about. I did numerous searches on Google News, New York Times, and even just plain old Yahoo! and I couldn't find anything. I think what I'm going to do is message all of the people in my Facebook group and see if they have anyone of interest that they want to know more about.

I'm so excited about this website, I hope that it will be up as soon as possible and that I will be able to find some type of "artsy" news available.

New Project

When I graduate college, I really want to write for a magazine...maybe eventually become editor of my own. I would really like to write for a fashion magazine or some type of literary magazine. For my final project for my journalism class, I would like to create some type of online magazine and find some way to gain traffic to my site.

I went on Yahoo! and searched "online magazines" and found a site called Magatopia. This site contains many links to all different websites of magazines. I looked at some of the websites that I would be interested in (Seventeen, Cosmo Girl, and Elle). These sites contain a variety of different applications ranging from quizzes, advice, fashion, celebrity news, and games. I think that this may be a little difficult for me to put together a site like this in such a short amount of time. I think I am going to go more of the literary magazine root and obtain works of art from people I know or maybe who I don't know.

Now I have to figure out how to make this website. I'm not really sure how to and I've never done it before. I've made a wikipage and a blog but nothing with links or anything that would really bring in traffic. I'll probably have to search for a site to find a free website maker.

Podcasting This I Believe

I finally finished my essay and I think that it is some what decent. As anyone can tell from some of my previous entries, I had an extremely difficult time starting this essay. I really couldn't think of any kind of idea. Everything I thought about seemed too juvenile or cliche to me; i felt like I could come up with a better topic. What I did come up with was how I had an experience that caused me not to trust people and how I eventually overcame that distrust.

It's not my best work but I guess I'll have to deal since I already recorded it. Yes, you read correctly, the whole class was asked to record our essays for the world to hear (well, maybe not the world but you catch my drift). I really hate my voice when I hear it on recordings or videos; I feel like I sound nasally and monotonous. It was a little hard to record it because I felt like I was stumbling on my words but the recording turned out to be something that I wouldn't mind sharing with other people.

The next step is uploading our recordings onto a page for another class of students, doing the same assignment, to listen to. We will also get a chance to listen to their essays and compare them with our own. I hope I get some good feedback on my essay/podcast; I'm really interested in finding out what people I don't know think of it.

The Buzz is Finally Buzzin'

So yesterday we finally got out our first issue of our school newspaper of the new school year. I can't believe we actually made it to 10 pages! I had made a poster and put out a box of the newspaper underneath it. Some of the staff helped me pass out the paper during lunch and around senior balcony. Surprisingly many people were really excited about it, though many wondered when we started to have a school newspaper...(it's been around forever by the way). I think we were so much more organized and from now on our paper is going to be so much better. Hopefully this year our reader turnout will be much larger. Eventually we are just going to put out a box of the newspapers so people can just pick one up; of course this will have to be after we can be sure that we have a large audience. I am very excited about the newspaper this year and I hope it keeps getting better

So, This I Believe...This is Getting to be Repetative

So this essay is not finished yet!! Please help with suggestions, I feel like this is going no where.
Essay:
What do I believe? That should be an easy question since it's a thought that is coming from inside of me, my own opinion, my own head. For some reason I can't really come up with much. What I can come up with, however, is what I can't believe. I have come to a state where I can't really trust people too often. When people cancel plans with me at the last minute, I always feel that they have found something better to do with their time. If people tell me that they will pay me back, I know I'll never see that money again. Sometimes I even have trouble believing that my friends really are my friends.
Back in middle school I had a little situation that occured between me and three other friends; two were girls and the other was a boy. Now I'm going to go with the style of Gossip Girl and use their initials: the two girls are W and J, the boy is M. So me and W were best friends; we had been for two years. This year I had finally gotten into our school play and had started becoming closer friends with J and M. Eventually I developed a crush on M and told W about it because I tell her everything. I thought I could trust her to keep it a secret but I shouldn't have because she ended up telling M all about it. He approached me one night after play practice and told me that he just wanted to be friends and that he really liked W.

Ok, so this essay is lame, I need to come up with a new idea. I was thinking of how I tend to get upset and say I hate my life when I know that there are many people in the world that have a way worse life than I do.

This I Believe....again

So, I'm still struggling a bit about what I am going to write about for this This I Believe essay. Originally I wanted to write about how my mistakes have changed me, but I have finally decided that any of my stories that would go along with this topic are way too cliche. I ended up thinking about another idea that I had. Because of some prior events, I have a problem trusting people. What I was thinking was instead of what I believe I'll write about what I can't believe. I'll probably even put in one, or both, of my stories to make it more personal. I hope this is a better idea than my last one and not as cliche, or unoriginal.....

I'M STILL SO CONFUSED!!!

This I Believe?

I recently learned about an essay contest/compilation (don't know what to call it) dealing with essays written about, basically, what people believe. It took me such a long time to figure out what to write about. I kept coming up with such cliche ideas like: everything happens for a reason, love at first sight, you don't know what you have until it's gone and gobbledygook like that. Is it bad to not really know what I believe in? I mean I believe in so many things like treat others how you wish to be treated, allow people to have an abortion or gay people to be married, God, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny (well, maybe not the last two...ha ha) but I can't really write about any of those things.

I was thinking so hard about this all day today (no seriously I was!) and I came up with you have to learn from your mistakes. Now I know that this goes on my list of cliche but I do have a few stories that I can talk about that involve this topic. So:
a) boys...hm, there are a two stories I can think of here
b) about a paper i had written got a bad grade and rewrote (totally cliche if you ask me)
c) none of the above

If anyone has any suggestions, I am desperate; I have no clue what to write about!!!

The Organization of an Unsystematic Hive

So this year I am the editor of my school newspaper, The Buzz. I have a co-editor who works with me as well. Other than us, it's three freshmen. This is a horrible staff. I wish it was a class but unfortunately we can only meet after school every Tuesday. At the beginning of the year I knew I wanted to make the paper more organized and so much better than it was but I didn't have the full motivation until now.

I went to a field trip this past Friday; Southern Connecticut University was having a Journalism conference. My 21st Century Journalism class went to this to get some ideas of the journalism world of today. One of the other high schools that was there was Wilbur Cross High School of New Haven. The advisor of that group was passing around copies of their student newspaper to everyone that he saw. Their paper is 20 pages to our 4 nevermind all of the pictures that we don't have. This really motivated me to start getting more organized.

In my Journalism class we learned about wiki pages and how to use them. I decided that this would be a good idea. I made a wiki page for our newspaper where everyone can compile their articles all together, have a place for everyone's emails, an article idea page, and we can all comment on eachother's articles to make them the best that they can be.

We ar actually gaining some new staff. I made our first deadline November 12th and the hopefully the first paper will go out on the 14th. I'll keep everyone updated!!

The Teachers' Views of Education

In my entry The Politics of Education, my teacher, Mr. Miller, left me a comment with a link to site that he thought that I should check out. It's called SupportBlogging.com which is full of blogs by teachers, principals, students, and parents about educational issues. I was looking through the blogs by teachers and found a blog written by a teacher named Mimi. In her blog, It's Not All Flowers and Sausages, she "vents" about her day and about all of the drama going on in school and with her co-workers. One of her entries is called, Parents Say the Darndest Things. She talks all about how parents don't want to hear that their kids aren't doing well and make up excuses. I rather enjoyed the conversation she had with the first parent about the Harry Potter book. My mom works at an elementary school as a special education aide and she hears this stuff all of the time so I have a feel for what she is saying and I know my mom would appreciate it. I know I'm going to keep on reading this blog. It gives me a sense of what teachers are thinking and that they have feeligns too!

The Parents' Views of Education

I was searching for another blog to look at involving education using Google Blog Search and came across a blog that is used for parents, teachers, and community members to talk about certain education issues. Betrayed - Why Public Education Is Failing is a very interesting perspective to view. Laurie Rogers writes all about topics, involving education, that adults of the community would care about. In her most recent entry, Education Flux is a Barrier to Truth, she talks about how the schools' curriculum is not up to par with what she thinks it should be. She even makes a good analogy using the episode of I Love Lucy when Lucy and Ethel work in the chocolate factory. At first it's easy to get the chocolates into the wrappers but then the belt starts moving too fast and in a panic, they stuff the chocolates into their mouths. Rogers relates this scene to the children in the public schools of America. She says that they haven't been properly wrapped (or not taught enough information) and have been sent down the conveyor belt of life too fast with the administration panic to pick up the pieces.

This analogy is actually really accurate. In this day and age, children are being forced to learn things too quickly just so they can pass standardized tests and are being pushed onto the conveyor belt of adulthood too soon and without the proper preparations, or "wrappers". Even thought Rogers writes for the adults of her community, this blog really interests me and I find that she has a lot of interesting and insightful things to say about the way education should be.

The Politics of Education

Since I've been looking up news articles about education, I decided to see what other people are saying about the educational issues of today. Education Week seems to be a very political blog about the issues dealing with education today.

One of the really interesting sections of the site is the Campaign K-12. This section talks about how kids and teachers are dealing with the election. One entry that really fascinates me is "Obama Has the Kid Vote Locked Up". It talks about how if kids were to vote, Obama would be the winner. In the entry, it is stated that according to the Scholastic Presidential Election Poll for Kids Obama got 57% of the vote and McCain received 39%. The poll was done through schools I believe; maybe online as well. I think this is a very interesting entry.

Another section of the blog that could be interesting to look at is the Special Education section. I would be interested in looking at it because it has entries involving trying to get better teachers and entries about different programs for autism and more. The only thing is, though, is that you have to pay for it. I think that if someone is writing a blog and wants his or her thoughts to be heard they shouldn't make people pay to read it. It seems to me that the people writing this blog aren't proud enough of it so they try to make it hard for people to read it by making people pay.

The Blog Olympics

I was asked to check out a few different blogs and to compare them; which ones are good, which are bad, do they all have good and bad qualities, and which is just the best blog overall. These three blogs are very different so how can someone tell which one should earn the gold medal?

Well, the first blog that I looked at was a blog for "tips and downloads for getting things done". Lifehacker seems to be a blog by many different authors, but they all give tips about about many different things in life. This could be a very helpful blog. The only thing that could be a problem is if the people writing these blogs give good tips. There isn't really a way to make sure that these tips are valid so I guess a person's own judgement is needed. I've read a few entries from this blog and they seem like they might be pretty helpful. There was an entry about how to navigate by using the night sky. There was also a really cool entry about a map that shows you where police officers usually hide out to track your speed. I would go to this site a lot if I wanted to see if I can get tips on something.

The second blog that I looked at was one written by members of the Huffington Post Internet newspaper. This blog focuses on the main issues of today. As I'm looking at it right now, most of there stories have to do with the election (mostly for the democratic side) and major political events. Even though the election is really important in the lives of Americans at this time, it's not the only newsworthy thing out there right now. The writers do write about other things such as entertainment and world news that but these entries have the option of a "quick read" which makes it seem like these entries wouldn't be as interesting or as important as the others without the "quick read" option.

The third, and final, blog that I looked at is written by a math teacher naming himself dy/dan. He seems to write about what he finds in his everyday teachings and comments on it. Some of the entries are very interesting and have a humorous tone to them. Sup Teach? written on September 27, 2008 really caught my attention. It was funny and it was great how he was reflecting on his beginnings of teaching by reading this of another teacher. He also writes about how his school just started to add advisory and his thoughts on how to go about utilizing it. Dy/Dan is a funny guy and it seems like he really loves to teach

The sum everything up, blogs can be for personal use, informational use, or something to help others. There can't necessarily be a best blog. There are so many categories that you can't pick one best blog out of all of the blogs in the world; that would be impossible. I have to say that all of these blogs are "the best" in their own way and they all deserve the gold!

"Bozo" Bus Driver has no Common Sense

Yesterday a five-year-old first grader was dropped off in the middle of the Bronx and left to wander the streets. The New York Daily News said that the little boy, Jaeden, was supposed to go to the after school program next door to his school but was accidentally put on the bus instead. Not knowing what was going on, Jaeden rode the bus until that last stop when the bus driver forced him to get off. The bus driver didn't even care that Jaeden had no adult waiting to pick him up. What else is a five-year-old to do but listen to his elders? This poor little boy had to ask a stranger for help because he was lost.

This is a disgrace. First of all, this kid was supposed to go right next door to the school for an after school program and somehow he was put on the bus. The school should have a better system of organizing where the kids are going after school whether it's on the bus, getting picked up, or going to an after school program. It wouldn't have been such an ordeal if the bus driver just took this little boy back to school after he realized that this kid wasn't getting off the bus but that's not what happened. Jaeden rode the bus until the last stop where the bus driver forced him to get off. This kid is five years old, he doesn't know any better than to listen to this bus driver. I can't believe that the bus driver didn't even realize that he didn't have anyone waiting to pick him up. Also, shouldn't he/she know what kids ride the bus? If someone that doesn't usually ride the bus that this driver is driving the driver should have figured that out and brought the kid back to school. This poor little boy had to fend for himself and ask a stranger for help because he was lost. Now, he's in the Bronx, this person that he asked for help could have been some bad guy with a gun and kidnapped him or something. Luckily this story has a happy ending. The lady that the little boy asked for help called the school and got him to his mother.

The Importance of a Blog

A blog can be very helpful in the learning process of this class. Learning about online journalism is very important because this day in age, media and online are used more than print. By posted entries and discussing other authors' works, it will help us understand what kind of topics we should write about and how we should write it. A great benifit of using a blog for part of our learning is that we get experience with online writing and people can even look at our blogs and comment on them. A drawback to using a blog could be that a person may comment on something that you wrote that you thought you did a good job on but they think the total opposite. All in all, writing a blog is such a good way to get your ideas out there and really helps with learning about the journalism of today.

Blogs can also be very helpful with learning in general. I recently learned that you can even search for different kinds of topics that blogs are about. Being able to do this will allow a person to learn about anything. If someone was interested in reading someone's thoughts about the election it would only take a two second search to find an infinite amount of blogs.

Is the Superintendent Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

This past Friday, a superintendent from Georgia, Kathy Cox, won $1 million on the television show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader". The New York Times stated that instead of keeping the money for herself, she decided to give the money to three schools in the state two of which were for the deaf and the other one to that for the blind. It was also a risk for her to go on the show because if she got a question wrong "she would embarass herself and the state school system". Luckily, when she chose to go for the million dollar question, she answered correctly and won the game. She says that she went for the million dollar question because she didn't want to have to say that she was "dropping out of school" in front of the children that many people are trying to keep in school. She didn't have to say she dropped out, but she did get to be the first to say, "I am smarter than a fifth grader."

I was really excited when I read this article because I always watch this show and I scream at the television when people can't get a first grade math question correct. I was even more happy that someone who is involved in the school system won the game. It would have been so embarassing for this superintendent to lose and have to say that she wasn't smarter than a fifth grader. I would lose respect for the schools in Georgia because the superintendent couldn't answer some of these simple questions. I've watched one in the past where the contestant was a former student of an Ivy league school and he got stuck of some of the simplest questions. Let's just say that this lady took risks and she was smart enough not to embarass herself.