Literacy memo

Creating a literacy narrative then turning it into an Animoto slide show is unlike anything I have ever done. It included many steps like making a timeline, then writing the essay itself and finally putting it all together for a slide show presentation.

            The first step which was the easiest for me was remembering important events from the past and turning them into a timeline. When making my timeline I noticed a lot of important things. Like without help from my family I wouldn’t be the literate person I am today. Another thing that I noticed is I like stories that have more excitement with a set story that is easy to understand. The theme that I though I would try to go for was based around different books that I read over the years. I chose this because I had a pretty good memory of these events and I think it helps readers visualize the level I was at. It took me awhile to come up with this common theme but once I did it made writing the paper a little bit easier.

            The second step which it thought was the hardest was the actual essay. It was hard because putting a bunch of different events together to make a story that makes sense is hard to do for me. Eventually I just decided to go in order by grade so it was easy to put in chronological order. My partner helped me make the essay more clear and helped me with a lot of other errors. I didn’t think anything about the slideshow until I started to do it. But when I did I had to figure out how to compress a 3 page essay into a 2 minute slideshow presentation.

            Lastly was creating the slideshow. This part wasn’t too hard, all I had to was get pictures and shorten some of the most important text in my essay. My partner did pick a lot of good sentences but I only used about half of what he said to try and stay within a certain theme throughout. My strategy for the 52 character limit was simple. First put the time period or grade in for the title then under that put the shortened sentence down only using the most important words. The hardest part of this was it still had to make sense. I used pictures for more detail because the text limitations made it hard to get my full point across. The pictures that I chose were all from the web and I chose them because they directly line up with the text slide before it. If I was to do something differently I probably would have tried to find my own pictures instead of pictures off the web. The song that I chose was “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down. I chose this song because it is one of my all time favorite songs even though it has no correlation with the theme.

            During this process I learned lots of different methods of composing and compressing my thoughts. I never thought I would ever take a essay and turn it into a slide show in a writing class. Overall this experience will help me become a better writer in a lot of different ways.