Tips for next year!

When I first started this class, I will admit that I certainly intimidated as well! For the first few days of class, things seem really complicated, but the thing about this class is that is different than any other classes. Never before had I had to communicate with a real company about what I was writing, or had to create something for them. Since you are working with a real company, real deadlines are involved. It was hard and frustrating at first to get used to being flexible with deadlines and yes, sometimes not knowing what was going on, but I quickly realized that is how real life is! Sometimes, things are due right in a row, but since we work in a group, the workload is never too much too handle. All of the assignments we did were able to be easily split up among all members of the group, which takes a lot of pressure off of you. As overwhelming as the projects may be, Angie is great about letting everyone know when things are due and being really understanding and flexible. One of the most important thigns to remember is to get comfortable with your group! I had a great group of all girls, and we all worked so well together becasue we able to always split up the work, stay in communication with one another, and be honest with each other! We saw GREAT results, and I was so proud to be a member of the Little Miss Sunshines group! In the end, everything comes together for this class, you just have to keep the big picture of what you are going for in your head! Good Luck!

Contribution to Final Project

In the upcoming week, since we will not be having class meetings, our group will be meeting to discuss our contribution to the final project. We know that we have to contribute clip art and the fundraiser link, so will be working to finish up those two things. For the fundraiser link, we will have to ask other group who had fundraiser links what they put on their link. WE can compile that information, and work it into our orignal link. HOpefully by doing this, we will cover the full scope of fundraising for the ASH.

Also, I think we will just compile all of the clip art so we will have them readily available for the final website. As of right now, I do not know what my final task will be to do to get ready for our final contribution. We will discuss this on Monday at our first meeting, but I imagine that it will nto very hard or time consuming to do, maybe just emailing a few people in other groups.

I am looking forward to seeing the final website soon, especially after seeing all of the group presentations!

Dual Coding Theory

The Dual Coding Theory is a very important theory that influences many aspects of our lives. It is a theory that says that visuals are associated with messages that we receive. The DCT is very widely used in marketing. In marketing, advertisers associate certain images with certain products. For instance, Coke is currently using a marketing campaign in which they use classic american small town life and associate images from it with drinking coke. By doing this, people are supposed to get that fuzzy happy feeling about Coke. Another example would be celelbrities being associated with certain products, such as Diane Keaton being the face for Revlon Makeup.

Another example is association of images with words, like they do when they teach young children how to read and spell... "A is for Apple". This practice helps the kids learn how to associate words with letters!

The DCT is widely used on the news by showing pictues with everything that they report on the news, and helpng people associate certain images with what they are talking about. This is a very effective method, and helps to excercise the power of the media. If you take the time to look, the DCT is all around us!

The Risks of Blogging

Let me just start off this post by pointing out that I am actually at work as I write this post...

If I had a personal blog that I wrote about my daily life in, I would be very cautious about trying to seperate the blog from my work life, becuase I know the risks of posting information that others, especially superiors, can see. I think it would be innappropriate to blog about others at my work, or about my superiors, becuase you are just putting that information out there for others to see, and you know that anyone has access to that info. I think it is fine to talk about like your social life and such things, but you just would have to use discretion when talking about them because you don't want others to think badly of you for the decisions you make when you are not at the workplace. I do think that it is unfair for people to be fired for writing about a company in their blog. I think reasonable discplinary action would be fair, and if the company has a policy about things that employees write, it is fine to go over it and make employees very aware of the consequences of putting the company in a bad light. IF a person never mentions the name of the company in their blog though, they have to remember that people always can find out where they work, or they might already know. I do think that blogging is different from just chatting in a bar on a Friday becuase blogging actually put things in writing for others to see. Overall, I think people should just avoid blogging about information that could get them in trouble!

This week, we have been asked to reflect on the project so far. I was confused ar first b/c I thought that I did this last week, but then realized that I had done this in the team blog, so for a little more detail, please refer to our team blog b/c I wrote it for last week! Today i n class we went over the proposal, and we are going to go over it in more detail on Friday. After going over this today, I feel better about it. I think we are going to be able to breeze right through this proposal, and I am so glad we will have class time to work on this b/c it gives us ample opportunity to ask questions and such. After class today, this is the only update I have since I last wrote the blog, so refer to that for more info!!!

Reflection on Interview

On Monday morning, I completed my mock interview with Angie. Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. I was not very nervous at all, so I think that made all of the difference in the world. I was able to not get to flustered about the questions that I was being asked and just answer then honestly. I thought that I gave good answers to the questions that were asked, and I feel like since I have a lot of involvement, it allowed me to drwaw on a lot of different experiences to answer the questions. That makes me see like a much more diverse and experienced interviewee. The feedback that I got from Angie was really good too, I was happy that she thought that I did well. I have had some interviews before, so I think that really showed in this interview, but I am glad that I got a nother chance to practice my interview skills. I know in a few years I will be interviewing for a lot of interviews, so this was a good chance to gain feedback. The one area Angie did mention that I needed to work on was always having additional questions to ask the interviewer about the company. This needs to be done since you want to make sure that you are showing the company that you have put time into looking into them and have made an effort. I can definitely work on this for the future!

Presentation Reaction

Today, we had our second day of presentations. I am really enjoying listening to all of the presentations b/c it is really interesting to hear about the variety of topics that people choose to present on. Its cool because you can learn a lot about people from what they choose to present on! I thought that the presentation on long snapping today was very interesting! It was something completely new to me, and it was so cool to learn about it! I love football, so its great to learn more about different aspects of the game. I also thought that he did a good job of demonstrating how thigs are done in a long snap. I also really liked Mary Beths presentation on her mission trip to New Mexico. I have been on a mission trip to a poor Hispanic part of Arkansas, and it really reminded me of that and what a great, eye opening experience it was! I cant wait to see the rest of the presentations now1
I gave my presentation on the first day, and I thought it went really well. I was very relaxed and not nervous at all! I think I wasnt nervous because I am familiar with most of the people in the class and was not intimidated. I was happy with how my presentation went and glad that people seemed interested in Spain! I was glad to hear what other people had to say about traveling abroad, and I really can not wait!