So now that week 9 has rolled around, it is finally time for me to start planning the final presentation. I spent about an hour earlier this week working on picking out a template for my google slides document. I am planning on using my favorite act of kindness from week 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and so on. Ill end up having 6 acts in the end to show as the top acts of kindness that amazed me the most. All of that I think will be able to create a powerful message to show that even though war, terrorism, and mass shootings are basically commonplace nowadays, there are still good things done by average people everyday.
With the research paper reaching an end soon, and with me being slightly behind, more time is being devoted to that instead of all genius hour. Article of the week is an assignment that we complete every week by writing a one page response. I usually try to complete those in Smart Lunch on Tuesdays and the use the rest of the week for genius hour and the paper, as well as homework and projects from other classes. American History as well as Physical Science has began to give more homework and assignments recently and that causes more of my time to be stuck completing those. I also end up spending a great deal of time working and thus, I must be effective in the time I have for homework in order to complete everything. Simply put, my time for everything has decreased so I must be most proficient that I can in the time that I have. I really need to work on my time management skills and try really hard to avoid procrastination. I end up often putting off work even though I know I need to complete it. I feel that if I can really work of reducing how much I procrastinate, I can help to stay on top of schedule and complete all my assignments on time. But other than that, everything is good. See you guys next week!
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Now that we are finally in week 8 of genius hour and I am back on top of my project, everything is going much more smoothly. With the addition of our junior research paper on top of article of the week and genius hour, the week is pretty loaded. None of those assignments are particularly hard, just simply time consuming. Now the real issue of time management comes into play. I must set time aside for all these projects, as well as any time required for other classes, which for me isn't much.
Most of my homework stems from English, so therefore I have plenty of set aside time to make my assignment look good. I can make these blogs good enough to please readers with some good interesting information. Hopefully my blogs are compelling enough to make people want to click on the real juicy section of my page. The "Acts" section contains all the awesome acts of kindness with updates of 3 every week. If my blogs can peak the interest of people enough to check out the other section of my page, then my task is complete. After all, the blogs are about the process, and the process is relatively simple. But it is not without its moments. There are a few struggles I faced this week. The main being forcing myself to type this blog. I was initially having a lazy spell, but I am glad I pushed through it and was able to get this blog out on time. This year i have definitely been trying harder to get everything done on time and with better quality, and so far I am pretty proud of myself for accomplishing that. But so far everything is good and I hope you guys enjoy your week! I am finally caught up. That's a huge relief to me as I was not very fond of doing 2 blogs in one week. But everything is good now. To be completely honest, I am not really sure what to write about in these blogs. The blog updates are meant to document the process of your project, but really, on a weekly basis, my process in basically the same. I don't have much variety in how I do these updates, besides from the different stories each week.
This issue is not concerning me at the moment, but I definitely feel as time goes on that I will have less and less to type into my blogs. I want them to at least be interesting to people and not to be the same thing over and over. I want people to at least have a little breath of fresh air every time they see an update. I want them to at least be like, "Wow, at least this is interesting and not the same as last weeks blog." After all, when people have to read the same thing over and over they tend to get bored and will possibly not click on the next update. Turning people away at the title is the worst thing a blog update can do. Blogs are supposed to keep people waiting in anticipation for the next one. You always want people to be excited about your blogs. You don't want them to click off before they see your awesome update. Or they might see who has written it and click off before they even bother to look at it. You want to keep your reputation good, and I need to work on that for future updates. Now that my little rant is over, I will say my project is moving ever swiftly on. I am making great progress and I make full use of my time in class on Wednesdays to work on my blogs and my "Acts" section of my page. Anyways, have a great week guys and I'll see you in the next one! Finally, we are halfway done with genius hour. This blog is going up a little late though. We did not have genius hour last week which caused me to be behind in the project. I have to now do two genius hour updates this week to make up for missing last week. But other than that, I am in a good spot for being halfway through the project time. Other than this week, I have kept on top on my work and my project is moving along very well. I should easily be able to finish by the time we are ready to present our projects.
Normally I always do all parts of my genius hour updates in class, as I have other things to do throughout the week, whether it be for English or not. Losing that time last week hurt me in a way, even though I had the day off. I must admit, I was lazy on my day off. I did not do much of anything so this blog being late is mostly my fault. I just chose not to complete it on my day away from school. So hopefully I am able to get the blog for both week 6 and 7 updated before Sunday, as well as my stories on my other section of page. The stories section is coming along very well and I am happy with my progress on that part. I think my final presentation will be full of some very kind things that will hopefully give everyone a few good thoughts to dwell on for a while. Thanks for reading guys! Its almost halfway. Week 5, 1 week before the halfway mark. I'm glad it's moving along. This week I've had to work more often after school and that will continue for the rest of the week. This leaves me less time to complete my blog updates but I'm still getting it done on time. There are some issues I need to update everybody on in this blog post however. That issue being the lack of pictures in the other main section of my website.
People have recommended for me to add pictures to each event in the "Acts" section, and I have a legitimate reason as to why I do not have any pictures, and it's not that I'm lazy. The flow I have set for the "Acts" section is very clean and smooth. It is easy to follow and distinguish which section is which. Adding pictures in would disrupt the flow and I think it will ruin the quick and fast approach for how I want people to read it. My final project at the end will include pictures of the 6 events I choose. That setting will likely be a Google Slides presentation and pictures will fit in more easily there. I want pictures to be present, but I don't want them in the "Acts" section, just the final project. But other than the picture issue, I don't really have any problems with the project. I am able to usually complete most of my weekly project work in class. It does not take me that long to type my blog update, or to post new acts. The research is probably what takes me the longest. This is a surprise as I had always figured that typing would be what kills me, as I am not that fast. I have also been able to improve my typing though, which I see as a beneficial side effect of this project. But all in all, everything is good, and I hope you guys come back next week to read! Genius hour is much more enjoyable this year. I am making good progress and I am staying on top of my blog this year. Hopefully it will keep my grades higher and further me as a student. I have always preferred projects that take a good amount of work, but not all at one time. Genius hour provides that. I can usually do most of my work in class where I am much more productive. At home, the temptations are usually to play video games with my friends, or I spend my time outside working. Since working at home is what pays off my truck payment every month, which I am responsible for. The agreement is, my parents bought me a new truck, and I work at home to pay back the money they spent on me. So at home, I am not usually a fan of doing school related things, even though I do complete my homework. So simply based on that, I have had a much better time with this project than I did last year.
Monday I did spend around 20 minutes looking online for things to go into my "Acts" section, and while I did find the 3 I needed, I had to go to 3 separate websites for each. This could become problematic in the future when needing to find 3 separate events for fill the space. For now, the process is moving on fairly swiftly an without much interruption or issues, but I have a feeling that will eventually change, as it always does. Unforeseen problems always arise within a project and this semester long assignment will probably be no different. I have also been keeping up with my google doc containing my favorite act of kindness from every other week, which means after I update this weeks, I will have two acts in there to be used for the final presentation. Hopefully, I will be able to continue this project in a timely manner and complete it all on time by the due date. See you guys next week. Week 3 already. This project is going by much faster than last year. Some things are different for me this week as compared to last week. I'm having to spend more time now to find different acts of kindness than I did last week. Last week and the week before, I was able to use the same website to find all the acts, but now I've used up most of the good stories on the site and I'm having to branch out to different areas.
It takes me a little more time now. I have to spend up more free time finding the different stories I want to use. I can only imagine that this will increase the farther I get into the project. With the more weeks that pass, I'll end up exhausting my resources and I might have to end up using some stories that are less than exciting. As long as I can mix one boring story in with two good ones each week, I should be fine. I don't want my page to become repetitive and boring because then people will not want to view it, and my positive message will not be able to be spread. If I end up using a boring story, then I have a plan to deal with that. I'll put an interesting story first in the "Acts" section, followed by the more dull one, and then finish it off with another exciting one. I will do this to grab the readers attention, as well as finish on a cool story. I will leave the boring stuff for the middle and keep the beginning and ending fresh and exciting. I haven't been able to update this weeks "Acts" section yet, so you'll have to check back later in the week when I'm able to find some good stories to share with the world. Now that I have changed my process to include acts of kindness from the past few years instead of just week by week acts, as they are very hard to find newly updated news sources containing these articles. I can do plenty more now as it is much easier to find good acts that actually make me feel good about them. I've noticed that it is much easier to write a more effective blog post as well as on my "Acts" section.
I have noticed that it does take me a lot longer to find random acts of kindness than I thought. I figured it would only take around 30 minutes to an hour to find the content necessary and then maybe 20 minutes to type them onto my page. The typing part is true, it doesn't take long at all to add them in, but finding the articles necessary to fill in the information takes upwards of an hour and a half. Once you find the information, the process moves along quickly, but getting to that point is difficult. I have found a website that contains a long list of recent acts of kindness around the world that I can reference and pull my favorite acts from to fill my page. Not all the acts have enough content, or a powerful enough message of unification, for me to consider. My first week of acts did come from that page however, and so will this week's. But after that, the resource will have probably been used dry, as most of the other articles will no suffice for my page. Hopefully, I am able to find other pages that include lists of acts, as it makes it much easier to find a litany of great content, without having to spend much time, as I have other classes with homework to attend to as well. The changing of the process has made this project much more enjoyable and I hope it makes it easier for others to read, with it all being from the same source per week. If you haven't already, check up on my "Acts" section of my page to read the most recent updates to my project listing random acts of kindness done by mankind. Week 1 has been a little crazy. Between having to actually plan out my process of how I'm going to find my information and type them into my blog, or designing my web page. A lot of time has been spent trying to formulate how I want my page to look and how my information will be played out. I want people to be able to easily swap between the blogs and the page containing the acts of kindness.
Sadly, my process has had to change a little bit as I have not been able to find three acts of kindness that all happen in a particular week. So I have extended my search to include any acts from the past 6 years that I mix and match to offer a wider variety of things on my page. This will allow me to find these acts much more easily as I spent over 2 hours this week trying to find one single act that occurred in this weeks time frame. I wasn't successful which is why I am extending my search. By doing this, I was able to find three acts in a much more timely manner which gave me more time to type up a better written article about them as well as spend more time on my blogs making them more eloquent. Next week, this increase in time can be spent anywhere necessary and I hope to make them much more efficient and easy to read. Including acts from many different years has made it much more fun for me as I can see everything people have done during past times of crisis and things like that. My project will involve me searching each week for three times humanity proves they are not as cruel as conventional news makes them out to be. I will document these into the "Acts" section of my website for everyone to see. Then, I will take my favorite choice of the three and type them into a google doc for later reference. I will then use my 6 favorite acts at the end, (chosen from the twelve in the doc) to make a presentation to prove that everyday, people can accomplish amazing things. The process of the research and development of the project will be typed into the blogs, while the acts of kindness will be documented in the "Acts" section. Basically I want to spread positivity and my idea of humanity being kind more often than not. My actual blogs on the process will begin next week and will commence the 12 weeks of blogging and documenting kindness around the world. The reason I want to accomplish this project is more for the benefit of others around me as opposed to myself in general. I want other people to be able to have some faith in their fellow humans. When events such as school shootings or terrorist attacks occur, I want my site to be a beacon of hope for people. I want to be a positive influence to people and their lives. Social media and the common news have a distinct way of showing the terrible things everyday instead of the good. People post fights and things like that for views, instead of where a individual maybe adopts a litter of abandoned kittens and gives them a home. I think my page can make people enjoy life a little more as opposed to feeling down. |
AuthorMy name is Max Sellers and I am a student at Davie County High School. I want to spread a positive message to the world about the kindness of humans. Archives
November 2018
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