Catherine the Great as Empress I know it's past the deadline for this project, but I just wanted to post this last post, half because I felt like it, but half because I felt like I haven't finished things up here yet :D
This project was better than I expected, to be honest. I could take control of my own website, customise the way I liked and post my progress as I went. The only part of making the website I didn't like was the note-taking part. The summarising part didn't go down well, and I think a lot of people, including myself, had issues with the formatting of notes and summaries. I tried posting my notes document, but it didn't work, because it was a PDF or something. (-.-)
Anyway, the other thing I didn't like was how we had lessons at the beginning, instead of at the end (near the deadline). During the lessons at the beginning, I really couldn't do a lot because I didn't know specifically what question I wanted to answer. So that resulted in a heap of research, and then the final product which barely used any. I think the lessons should have been focused on refining the final product into a product that directly raises an issue or addresses the question, rather than wasting the first two weeks of lessons looking for a question or searching for information that might not be relevant. That happened to me...and I spent the last week freaking out over whether it answered the question or not.
The good parts: I learnt a lot about the area that I was interested in, and I feel like I have accomplished something? In a lot of projects, we don't get the freedom to choose a specific area of interest from a broad topic, let alone the life, legacy and character of a given personality. Although it took me a while to narrow it down to a specific question - Catherine's authenticity - I think that this freedom was what made this project so interesting. Everyone chose different topics, and everyone had different final products. It was really cool to see what other people have made and what ideas they had about Catherine's relationships, her character compared to other people, and her contributions. In terms of feeling like I have accomplished something - I used to never write fiction (unless you counted when the meaningless rubbish I wrote in year 7), and I actually made something that I spent a lot of time drafting. It was a process I never really gone through - how can you draft an essay in 40 minutes during a class test? Creative writing itself and learning different writing styles from people like Felicity Pulman and books like the Royal Diaries was really interesting and I liked it. That's why I felt like the final product was something I had created from scratch and something I developed over time.
Um, I hope you like the final product, but more importantly, I'm glad that I could show you the process of how I made it :)
This project was better than I expected, to be honest. I could take control of my own website, customise the way I liked and post my progress as I went. The only part of making the website I didn't like was the note-taking part. The summarising part didn't go down well, and I think a lot of people, including myself, had issues with the formatting of notes and summaries. I tried posting my notes document, but it didn't work, because it was a PDF or something. (-.-)
Anyway, the other thing I didn't like was how we had lessons at the beginning, instead of at the end (near the deadline). During the lessons at the beginning, I really couldn't do a lot because I didn't know specifically what question I wanted to answer. So that resulted in a heap of research, and then the final product which barely used any. I think the lessons should have been focused on refining the final product into a product that directly raises an issue or addresses the question, rather than wasting the first two weeks of lessons looking for a question or searching for information that might not be relevant. That happened to me...and I spent the last week freaking out over whether it answered the question or not.
The good parts: I learnt a lot about the area that I was interested in, and I feel like I have accomplished something? In a lot of projects, we don't get the freedom to choose a specific area of interest from a broad topic, let alone the life, legacy and character of a given personality. Although it took me a while to narrow it down to a specific question - Catherine's authenticity - I think that this freedom was what made this project so interesting. Everyone chose different topics, and everyone had different final products. It was really cool to see what other people have made and what ideas they had about Catherine's relationships, her character compared to other people, and her contributions. In terms of feeling like I have accomplished something - I used to never write fiction (unless you counted when the meaningless rubbish I wrote in year 7), and I actually made something that I spent a lot of time drafting. It was a process I never really gone through - how can you draft an essay in 40 minutes during a class test? Creative writing itself and learning different writing styles from people like Felicity Pulman and books like the Royal Diaries was really interesting and I liked it. That's why I felt like the final product was something I had created from scratch and something I developed over time.
Um, I hope you like the final product, but more importantly, I'm glad that I could show you the process of how I made it :)
RSS Feed