Our task was to create either a video or a storyboard about our assigned chapter, from Thomas Friedmans book, The World Is Flat. I was assigned Chapter 5, America And Free Trade.


Chapter 5: America and Free Trade

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This is a slideshow I created using pictures of me and Emelina, pretending to converse. It is talking about America and Free Trade, and how outsourcing has caused a large amount of unemployed people. In the book, Friedman talks about how they should lower the amount of outsourcing done in jobs, so that there are some jobs left for Americans, so me and Emelina say this in our conversation. You can view the SlideShow above, or on SlideShare, here

The idea of using stills of me and Emelina occurred to me when I was messing about with Photo booth, a program to take pictures with the built in Webcam on the Mac. I thought if I could take pictures that looked like talking, I'd be able to add subtitles, to explain the main idea behind the chapter. I originally planned to use iMovie, but was unable to upload it anywhere, so I opted to use Powerpoint.

Information Technology

In Information Technology, we are using the MYP Design Cycle. The Design Cycle is based on 4 different steps:

• Investigate
• Design
• Plan
• Create
• Evaluate

These steps are not numbered, as you can go in any order, as long as you start with Investigate and end with Evaluate. With the Design Cycle, you can go back and forth between the steps. For example, you could Investigate the topic at hand, or what you are going to make, Design it, Plan it, encounter an error in the Create stage, and go right back to the Plan stage. However, you have to do the Evaluate stage last, as you can't look back on something that isn't there. And you can't just say "I'm going to build a spaceship" and build one without knowing exactly how, and the Investigate stage helps you discover how things are made. This is a very important step in the Design Cycle.

The Design Cycle is also a large part in the grading of a project. Each stage is graded individually, and used to create your final grade. Meaning that you can't miss anything otherwise it could severely damage your grade.

The Flat Classroom project requires a video to be made. Here, I will evaluate 2 videos on the Ning for the project.

The first video I will evaluate was made by Spencer B. Liberto. His video was an internet show called "Karys's Really Awesome Interview Show" where Karys interviews someone. This episode, Karys interviewed Spencer, who played Mark Zukerberg, who is the creator of Facebook. He talked about how Facebook has helped the world to join together, and to help causes such as charities, with the Causes feature of Facebook. He also talks about how it can get people to be more connected and help the people of the world to communicate in an easier way.  I think that the video was pretty well done. The editing was little, but it was good where it was apparent. There was a lot of good points raised, but the camera work was not the best in the world. It was stable, however the quality was low. Also, by using YouTube, it was open to more viewers rather than just those who know about the Ning, including the exact url etc. whereas the YouTube users can just search and find the video, and also any Subscribers to Spencer's YouTube account will know that he posted a new video.