Show and Tell Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHc_fXtsj0

This link is the video example for our mini-lesson assignment.

This video is educating the views about what has happened with our economy on many different issues. It is giving them statistics about job rates or unemployment rates from the last couple of years. It says the numbers but also shows the numbers which helps the viewers get a better understanding I think.

I think it is a good example for our class on this assignment because it has many voice overs from different people which shows that the topic is being talked about by more than one person, which makes it seem important. It does not use different location, it just focus on the boy riding his bike, but I think the different voice overs can represent the different locations in a non literal sense.

The video I think is kind of creepy but the message it is trying to get across is to vote because the viewers wouldn't want their children or their lives to be lifeless like the video scene was. It is saying we can make a difference and change all the statistics stated in the video around so it is important to vote.

Weekend Twitter

Twitter is something that I have had for a couple years now. I don't tweet too much but I think before this assignment I tweeted a decent amount. After doing this assignment I learned quite a bit more about politics. I never really was that involved in politics but I'm glad we had this assignment to get me more involved.

My favorite part of this Twitter experience was to see how people would reply to my political tweets. I tried to stay unbiased because I didn't want to start any trouble through Twitter. Some people will bash other people, just like cyber bullies do, and I didn't want to involve that in this assignment. Some people responded to the voting tweet I made about only having one day. They wanted to know if they could vote online and that was important because I think people should get out and vote. it is our job as citizens to do that and I'm glad people asked how they could do it. What I didn't like about this assignment was that I felt it was hard for me to tweet in reply to a politicians tweet. I thought this was hard only because I do have so little knowledge about some of the tweets they were talking about so I felt out of place on that part.

Twitter allows you to get a point across in a clever way. On Facebook you can put as many words as you need to but on Twitter you are limited so it has to be clever and short. It's a fast way for people to read and get information without spending however long reading a long post where half the information does not even matter. I only engaged in a few political conversations this past weekend but that was important because it taught me more each tweet I read.

I think after this weekend I will still follow a few of the politicians I started following on Thursday because they did inform me on good information I think everyone should know. I still think Twitter is a clever use of social media and it keeps me up to date on many issues. I also like to read people's tweet about their views on things to see how it compares to mine. This assignment actually helped me in one of my other classes because I got to see how many posts were about false claims of the other candidates. That is the topic of my other class and so I used many tweets as examples for that class. I liked doing this Twitter assignment and it made me like Twitter that much more!

Infographic elements

The elements I used to make my infographic were a picture of Obama's head and a picture of Romney's head. In between those two I used another picture of just the word vote. Those pictures did not have any copyrights on them, that is why I used them. I put the layers together by first putting the pictures on different layers, the each of the text lines were a different layer also. I then went back and put the color on the texts and used shadowing and outlining for them.
I got my information from different sites to use for my texts...
http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/FS_08_exit_polls.pdf
http://www.civicyouth.org/quick-facts/youth-voting/
http://www.yda.org/resources/youth-vote-statistics/

My Infographic

When I started making this infographic I wanted to do something similar to the example that I had. I wanted to make it unbiased so I decided to do make infographic all about voting. I focused on our age groups, which are preferred to as the "young people." I found statistics and went off of those to inform the "young people" why it is important to vote. I keep hearing "this election is an important one" or "people need to get out and vote for this 2012 election" so I focused on that.

From the reading we did in an earlier class, "Picturing Texts" I think my infographic describes his use of "emphasis" the most. I tried to make the word VOTE the largest so people understood that is the point I was  trying to make. I want to direct people attention to that and to understand it is for the 2012 election I incorporated Obama's and Romney's faces right by the word vote. I also think my infographic shows a good use of "proportion." I split up each line of the texts from left to right so it didn't look to crowded or sloppy. I also decided to make each line a different size then the one below it. If you follow from top to bottom it starts out large and becomes smaller right in the center then back to large. I put the text in order from which I thought was most important.

It was fairly easy putting the pictures and the words into my infographic. the hardest part of the assignment was trying to align the text the way I wanted to, to make it look the most organized. Also I had trouble remembering how to make the words look fancy and use shadowing and other effects, but  with help from my classmates I was refreshed on how to do it.

I learned that visual design can do a lot to get a big point across. The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" i think is very true. A small picture can get an important message across if the design is right and it catches people's eyes. I did not want to use too many different colors but just a pattern of ideas to make my infographic visually appealing and easy to understand. I think I accomplished that for the most part.