What do you think the speakers intentions are?

I think Chris’s intentions are to make a new type of school which kids will be hungry to learn and look at going to school being fun not something that is forced upon you to do. I also think he is trying to incorporate more technology in school learning which would make it fun for the kids to use the modern day technology while learning.

What is he trying to accomplish?

I personally think he is trying to educate people on this new type of school (School 2.0) he has created and how he thinks it is better and why. I think he is trying to accomplish spreading the new idea to people to hopefully persuade them to expand his idea.

Who is his audience?

His audience might be fellow teachers or educators. Also there may have been some students that would like to get involved in this new school idea.

Did it work?

Yes, it defiantly worked for me. I would love to go to that kind of school cause I strongly believe this is the future of the world, technology. I also think that when I work on a computer, I can write better, read better, come up with better ideas and don’t feel like I am being forced to do the work, I enjoying doing school work on the computer. But when I am sitting at a desk with a pen and notebook I feel like I am being forced to work and therefore I don’t do as good as job on my work as I would when using a computer. I think all schools should be exactly like this.

Have I ever felt like a Outsider?

Yes, I have felt like an Outsider in the past. For example, I felt like an Outsider when I first moved from Canada to Qatar. I didn’t know anyone, I had no house to live in at the time I stayed in a hotel, I didn’t know my way around the city but I watched other people in the malls having a good time with there friends like I used to have in Canada with my friends there. I felt like an Outsider then but it eventually went away when I found a school and got into the school, started making friends, starting to know the city better. Let me tell you, if you haven’t experienced something like this yourself before… It is a weird feeling especially coming from a place where you know everyone and are with a friend all the time, like I was.

I don’t remember any other time I have felt like a Outsider, that would be the only time.

In History class we are studing all the diffrent wars that have occured in the past, my category is Urban Warfare. I am studing combat in citys and urban areas. This clip shows what Urban Warfare is was like.

I choose this clip because I thought that it shows how it really was in World War II when they were fighting in urban areas. There is some really good footage on this clip and I believe that it is truly filmed in World War II. It also shows lots of buildings getting damaged, people getting shot in buildings, people shooting out windows of buildings Etc… This was one of the best clips I could find on YouTube. I hope this will show you how Urban Warfare was in World War II.

For the last week or so in English class the class has been learning about Voice and Word Choice, this is something that can really change your writing. It can make it better and more attractive to read than just plain boring writing we see everyday.

Voice is something that is you, it is your voice and you control it. It can be anyway you would like it to, you know it is your true voice when it sounds like you’re the one talking when reading what has been written.

Word Choice is using different words when you are writing, for example if I wrote “then” I could pick a better word to use like for example “after”. Word Choice is also picking more descriptive words to use in your writing you don’t just want to use a plain everyday word, you should look for more of a descriptive, exciting word to use so it makes your writing a lot better to read. For example; If I wanted to say “the boy was angry” that is plain and boring. I need to put better words into the sentence so for example I could say “The Young Man Was Furious” that makes the sentence something better to read and not only that it does it also makes it look better to the reader.

I really liked learning about this, I can already see an improvement in my writing. I don’t just use it in English class I use it everywhere I write. For me this also makes writing more fun. Word Choice and Voice is something that I really enjoyed and benefited from.

After I was done with the “Ideas” part of the magazine article I went to the ‘Organization’ part. How I did that was first I had to make 3 main ideas for it that I am going to talk about in my magazine article about Snowboarding. My 3 main ideas are:

1) Fearless

2) Gliding In The Snow

3) Riding In The Terrain Park

I thought that these 3 main Ideas where good because they explain a lot about snowboarding. You are fearless when you are snowboarding, you do glide in the snow when you are Snowboarding, and people do ride in the Terrain Park when they Snowboard.

After that I went to using Transition Words. They are words that help your ideas come  together to make more sense and not make it seem like there is a big jump between different topics. Some good examples of some Transition Words would be; besides, as a matter of fact, consequently Etc. Next I was to go to Google Docs (Where I have been editing my article) I was supposed to go in and pick out the transition words that I used.

Hey Everyone! I need some help on getting Data on what people think of Shaun White and the sport of Snowboarding. Please click here, it will take you to the form for you to help me out and answer some simple questions!

Thanks Everyone!

My Topic for my magazine article that I am writing is on Shaun White (Professional Snowboarder) I picked Shaun White as my topic because he has accomplished many awards and medals in his Snowboarding and Skateboarding career. He has also been through many surgeries, he was born with a Tetralogy of Fallot and endured two open-heart operations.

How I narrowed down my topic was I came up with 10 different ideas those ideas where:

1. Snowboarder

2. Fearless

3. Role Model

4. Cool

5. Chilled out

6. Has now worries, does what he needs to do

7. Performs well

8. Looks Cool

9. Nothing is impossible to him

10. Love to Snowboard

After listing those 10 ideas, I then narrowed them down to only 3 catogories that will make it easier for me to choose a good idea to then write a good topic sentence. The 3 catogories are:

1. Fearless

2. Gliding on the Snow

3. Riding in the Terrain Park

So, now I have listed my 3 categories that were narrowed down from my 10 ideas that were listed above. Now I narrowed the topic down even more! I took the 3 categories and narrowed it down to one topic sentence. My topic sentence was:

I am floating, I feel like I am flying but know I am only gliding among the snow as I fall like a leaf falling from a tree towards the ground.

This is a topic sentence, it is basically something that tells about what you are writing about in short form of course. Now that I have narrowed my topic down from Shaun White to my Topic Sentence I can begin writing my article cause I now have a idea in my head that I have to follow to keep my article interesting, exciting, want to read more type of stuff that everyone loves.

Develop and adapt active reading skills and strategies:

I think that the visualize strategy helped me the most out of all of the strategies because I actually painted what I thought the Island might look like and how I visualized how the     boys lived.

Some examples of the visualize strategy was when we painted a happy and dark picture of the Island to get a better understanding on how it looked like, another activity we did in     class that falls under the visualize strategy would be when we took     pictures of our paintings put them on the computer and then edited them on the computer to make them more detailed.

Yes, I made some adjustments by editing the painting and also editing in words and sentences around the painting to make it more detailed. Next time I might do the painting a little bit different in the way of actually painting more detail into the picture to make it more understandable.

A strategy I would like to try next time in more detail would be the clarify strategy. I think that the clarify strategy would be useful because when you talk important parts of the  novel with other people and hear other people’s ideas and what they think of the book it can help you better understand parts of the book you don’t understand and maybe after  talking with another person will make you think of things that have happened that you didn’t know happened.

Understand and respond to ideas, viewpoints, themes and purposes in texts:

I have picked the theme Fear of the Unknown. This theme is about everyone being afraid of the ‘’Beast’’ that is thought to be living in

the forest; the boys do not know what the beast is or what it wants. They are afraid of something they have never seen before.

I understood this quite well knowing that there might not even be a beast that everyone was afraid of something that was said to be seen and not actually been seen. Simon would walk around the forest during the night when everyone was sleeping on the beach; if Simon walked the forest at night he would have most defiantly seen the beast if there was one.

This theme changed throughout the book in the way of everyone was realizing that there might not be a beast and if there was it either didn’t want to hurt them or the beast was scared of the people, the people that killed pigs, made fires, made loud noises and had no fear to kill. Eventually the two separate groups spread apart. Jacks group and Ralph’s group. I think that as they became more adapted to the island and lost fear in all, they were no longer scared of the beast; they were now thinking if the beast comes to attack us we could fight it off. They had sharp sticks and rocks, weapons.  They were no longer scared of the beast; they were scared of each other. What was left of the survivors of the crash when they first got on the island they went into survival mode, now closer to the end of the book they have lost fear in everything they now have fear of what the groups will do to capture or kill the other. They have adapted to the island and have totally forgotten about being rescued they are more worried about harming the other group to capture revenge.

Relate texts to the social, historical and cultural contexts in which they were written:

William Gerald Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in Cornwall England.  At the start of World War II, he entered the Royal navy and served with distinction on mine sweepers, destroyers, and rocket launchers. He believed that the horrors of World War II can be based on some innate evil which he explores in Lord of the Flies. The book was written during the first years of the Cold War and the atomic age; the events arise in the context of an unnamed nuclear war.

“When I was young, before the war, I did have some airy-fairy views about man. But I went through the war and that changed me. The war taught me different and a lot of others like me,” William Golding told Douglas A. Davis in the New Republic. Golding was referring to his experiences as captain of a British rocket-launching craft in the North Atlantic, where he was present at the sinking of the Bismarck, crown ship of the German navy, and participated in the D-Day invasion of German-occupied France. He was also directly affected by the devastation of England by the German air force, which severely damaged the nation’s infrastructure and marked the beginning of a serious decline in the British economy.

Although highly romanticized in both Western fiction and nonfiction, life on a typical tropical island is not all that easy. The weather is usually very hot and humid, and there is no breeze when one enters the jungle. While fish swim in the surrounding waters and the scent of tropical flowers float through the air, one must still watch out for sharks, and one cannot live on a diet of fruit and flowers. James Fahey, a naval seaman who served in the Pacific islands during the war, concluded: “We do not care too much for this place; the climate takes the life right out of you.”

Analyze how writers’ use of linguistic and literary features shapes and influences meaning:

Simile: Pg.196 He shied like a horse among the creepers

Simile: Pg.195 sped away again, till his chest was like fire.

Simile: Pg. 201 a flame, seemingly detached, swung like an acrobat and licked up the palm heads on the platform.

The first simile means to me to run fast and carelessly going through things you would never do if you cared about what was going to  happen.

The second simile means to me to be working so hard without stop or a short break until your body shuts down of exhaustion and you get a

big burning sensation in your body.

The third simile means to me to explain how the fire dances among the palm trees and explains were the fire is going and what will the fire do next. It also explains that the fire is unexpected and could do any given thing at anytime.

A visual example for the first simile is that he ran like a horse, not knowing when to stop or were to turn. Running as fast as he can careless of his surroundings.

The visual example for the second simile would be he ran as fast as he could, his body was so exhausted from working and moving so hard that he had a burning passion among his chest this made it hard to breathe and his body was begging for a break.

For the third simile a good visual example is the fire was spreading from one side of the island to the other without a chance to stop. The fire was unstoppable it spread among the palms fast. The whole island was up in flames, palm tree leaves fell to the ground with flames attached

These literary features influenced my experience with the novel greatly; it helped me understand the novel much better than just reading it once. You actually go over the words again and again to answer questions and when answering questions you express more of what you think in your head when reading the novel. If you go over important things over an over again and again you will understand them better than just seeing it once and moving onwards.

Hello Everyone!

Just wanted to post a couple pictures that I had just recently took and edited. Hope you like them!