Courage
Blog Post #1
Heyo! My name is Neha and for this years Genius hour I decided to focus on animal abuse or cruelty. I am very excited to spread awareness about this topic since is such an overlooked thing. The challenges will be gathering accurate information, since there are many websites out on the internet and also this topic will be based off of opinion. The pro's of working in a group are you can get things done faster. I know this from personal experience. People work at different paces, and while you might take five minutes to get an assignment done, another person could take twenty. Another pro is that you don't have disagreements on topics. Being in a group can lead to arguments about things that are viewed differently. The con's of working in a group is you cant personally have what exactly you want on your website, unless whoever you are working with is just like you. At first I thinking about to doing dog abuse but I felt that would be too narrow of a topic so I broadened it to animal abuse. I was also thinking about doing animal enclosure but I thought this topic was more common and needed to be brought to the attention of.
Blog Post #2
I think it's appropriate to use Wikipedia for when you need broader not in depth information. There are many con's to using sites like Wikipedia when trying to gather information for a important paper or essay. One reason being that everyone is able to contribute and add or delete information from different topics on Wikipedia. This is bad because when you are doing research you don't want false information.
Databases are used for published, classified magazines article, etc. Search engines use the keywords you put into your search and finds millions of pieces of information based on that.
Britannica Online
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Overdrive
I'd like to check these three databases out for my research.
Blog Post #3
In this blog post I will perform the C.R.A.P test on two of the three databases I chose in my last blog post. C.R.A.P Stands for currency, reliability, authority, and point of view.
The first database i am going to perform the C.R.A.P test on is Britannica Online.
C- Currency- The article that I am doing my research on was updated less than a year ago, and looking at other articles on Britannica for conformation, all the articles were more or less last updated in 2016.
R- Reliability- Since Britannica is a world renown database it is pretty reliable.When I looked at the articles I did not see any sources listed, but it is from a credible source.
A- Authority- I read a couple of articles and even though there are different authors writing each article, each one is highly detailed with a great format. you can clearly see a lot of effort has gone onto the article. Most of the articles were published in an organization of some sort, and there is an editor on each page which means no grammar mistakes or incorrect spellings.
P- Point of View- looking over the articles I can see no signs of bias. All things said were facts.
Blog Post #4
Blog Post #5
For this post I was supposed to reflect and add to my visual representation using two of my peers opinions. Unfortunately I never received the comments so I was informed to do a self-evaluation. One thing I think I could have improved on was my lack of description. Looking at the visual representation above I think I could have really elaborated on question #1 because I could have gone more in depth about what I was doing for my project. Also the way I have formatted I really regret. Everything seems so jumbled up and I myself and not really able to see the order of the questions. I also wished I had increased the font size because it might be hard to see for others.
Blog Post #6 Works Cited
Blog Post #7
In class we watched two Ted Talk presentations, which gave us a glimpse on how to present properly to an audience. The five tips I would give to someone who is presenting is be confident, make the audience laugh, make eye contact, have a good vocal projection, and have a strong claim. I think my strengths as a presenter is my vocal projection. I am typically very loud so talking softly is probably not even possible for me. What I need to work on at the exhibit is probably confidence. I tend to get nervous when talking to large groups, and this causes me to fidget. Also when talking, my voice tends to shake, and sometimes it gets caught in my throat. To overcome all of this, I will practice in front of my family, present to my self over and over again, control my fidgeting, and try to control the shaking of my voice.
Blog Post #8
This is the project as a whole. I have included captions, important information, definitions, and more. In the bottom left hand side of the screen you can see I have included a key, in order to make navigating the poster easier. Animal cruelty was summarized in this poster. I included ideas on how to help the animal community at the bottom of the poster.
This side of the poster mostly focuses on dog abuse. I chose to bring more awareness on this part of cruelty becasue 70% of abuse cases reported are to do with dog abuse.
On this side of the poster, I chose to bring awareness to more common things going on, like where all the meat we eat comes from, and animal hoarding.
3 things I learned:
Factory farms is an abusive industry.
Famous NFL players have been involved with professional dog fighting.
People consume horse meat
3 challenges I faced:
Finding accurate information because animal cruelty is based off opinion.
Putting the poster together in a way where information was clearly conveyed.
The stress and amount of work that was loaded onto my shoulders.
Reflection:
The genius hour experience for me was not great but not bad. I did learn a lot of new information on the topic, but I didn't really see the point. Everything was too chaotic and thrown together. There was no "real" guidelines to follow and the rubric was given far too late into the project. I didn't clearly understand the basis of the project. The exhibit was SUPER chaotic. I couldn't tell who was at my presentation and who was watching another presentation. Many people came to my presentation due to the fact that I had candy. I was very giggly because I do that when I get nervous, so I would improve on that next time. I didn't really "gain" ideas from my peers other than the fact, bring candy to your presentation. Overall this project was not very beneficial, but I did gain information on my topic.