My Blog

Word count of 2200 sign source:  Wikimedia For this weeks tech tip I chose to write about the google chrome extension, word counter. Word counter is an extremely helpful tool that will count how many words you have in a paragraph at the click of a button. It is extremely helpful for a class like this where you have a word minimum and maximum on certain blogs. Before using this tool I was copying my paragraphs into Microsoft Word which took some time because I had to open up Microsoft Word then copy it in, but now I can get the count at the click of a button. I would highly recommend getting this extension.

Lion and Crane Source:  Un-Textbook For my story notes this week I chose to do them over Indian Fairy Tales. This reading is a multiple different stories within one reading. Each story is different and has its own setting and plot line. Two of the stories that stood out to me were "The Lion and the Crane" and "The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal." These two stories are both similar in content. Both of the stories have an animal known to kill who are saved by someone or something else and does not return any favor for saving the beast.  In “The Lion and the Crane” a crane saves a lion from choking on a bone and the lion says to the crane his reward is him not being eaten. In “the Tiger, Brahman, and the Jackal” the Brahman saves a tiger from a cage but the tiger says he’s going to eat the Brahman after he got out. The tiger then had to be tricked back into the cage to save the Brahman’s life. I think it would be a great turn around to make a new story with...

Coffee and Journal Source:  Max Pixel For this week's blog I decided to do a story lab over two different articles from the  Writers Write Website. These two articles that I chose to read about were "3 Simple Ways to Kickstart Your Writing" and "Create Power Paragraphs for Stronger Storytelling." The reason I chose to read these two articles is to help improve my writing skills in general. Writing has not always been my best suite so I would like to improve it any way that I can. 3 Simple Ways to Kickstart Your Writing  by Anthony Ehlers This article is about how to get out of that writing slump that happens every so often. Sometimes you will be sitting at your desk and just nothing will help you get a story out on paper. So this article has three useful tips to get out of that. The first useful tip given is to do what they call "Suess it up." By "Suess it up" they me that you should write a fun poem like one of the famous poems by Dr...

Canvas Source: Wikipedia The tech tip that I did this week was over the Canvas App for the University of Oklahoma. This app allows you to view your grades, homework, or any other class information that your teacher has provided all conveniently on your mobile device. My personal experience with this app has been amazing. I am able to check my grade wherever I am for any test or assignment whenever I want. Also I receive notification on when grades are put in or homework assignments are put up so that is also an extremely helpful feature. I would 100% recommend having this app if you have a mobile phone and attend the University of Oklahoma.

Story now in my  portfolio Magic Lamp Source:  Pixabay Hello MTV my name is Genie, you can just call me Geen for short, and welcome to my magical crib! So far I've been living here for about a millennium now and don't plan on leaving anytime soon. Currently this house is just over 100 square inches and I plan to make some additions hopefully sometime in the near future. These additions will give me something to since I am stuck in here until somebody rubs my house. Oh yeah I almost forgot to tell you that special detail, this lamp is magically and if someone on the outside rubs it then I’ll have to grant them some wishes! Well enough of the small talk let’s get started with the tour of the house. As you enter into my humble abode, you will first walk into the foyer but I call it “the lobby.” I call this the lobby because it is the first room you have to go through to get to anywhere else in the house. Here I will usually come and great my guest so it just makes sense fo...

A magical genie Source:  Pixabay For this post I will be talking about Arabian Nights, Part B, which is "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp". This story is about Aladdin who lives in a poverty stricken Chinese town with his mother because his father died. One day Aladdin was playing in the streets when a magician came up to him and said that he was his uncle and told him to come work with him which will make Aladdin wealthy if he did. Aladdin decided to take up the magicians offer and the magician took Aladdin to the a cave that was booby trapped but told Aladdin to go in and retrieve an "oil lamp" within. When Aladdin got the lamp he refused to give it to the magician making the magician angry and he trapped Aladdin in the cave. After two days of being trapped Aladdin rubs a ring that magician had given him for protection and a genie appears in which he wished to be back home. At home Aladdins mom tries to clean the lamp that Aladdin had found and from rubbing it ...

A monster called a Genius trying to kill a merchant but three old men are trying to talk him out of it Source:  Un-textbook For this blog I will be writing about Arabian Nights, Part A. This story is about a king who found out his wife had cheated on him and decided that all women were equal. So every day since he found out he would marry a new woman and have her executed the next morning by the grand-vizir. Now the grand-vizir is the one who would not only execute the women but also bring them to the king. One day the Grand-vizirs daughter Scheherazade told her dad that she wanted to marry the king. The Vizir did not like this at all but after a long argument he had no choice but accept his daughters request. The daughter, Scheherazade actually had a plan to stop the killings all together. After being married she will ask the king to allow her sister to spend the night since it will be her last night in which the king agreed. This night Scheherazade told a story to her sister ...

Stopwatch source:  123RF The google timer is a great thing you can use at any time while on your computer. All you have to do is simply going to google and search timer and it will appear right under the search box. This timer can be used for many things but I think the best two things to use it for are for study breaks. Whenever you doing homework a really long time you can often get very distracted and the amount of work you do slows down. So this timer can be used to take a study break for a certain amount of time so you can go back to doing homework feeling refreshed.

My Portfolio Welcome spelled with scrabble letters Source:  TheBlueDiamondGallery

Michael Jordan in the air about to dunk Source:  Deviantart This is a story about a family with a dad name John and fours kids named Jack, Cody, Tanner, and Ryan. All the kids were around the same age with the ages ranging from 12 to 15 years old with Ryan being the oldest and jack being the youngest. In this group of brother the clear favorite to the father was Ryan. Ryan always did everything right, didn't cause any trouble, and always helped out around the house if he could. The other three brothers all were jealous of Ryan and wanted their father to make them his favorite. So in order to make this happen the three kids formed together and tried to set traps for Ryan to make him get in trouble making him not eh favorite anymore to his father. The first trap that the three kids set was by throwing away Ryan's paper to get him in trouble with school thus making their father very disappointed with Ryan. So the three kids went into Ryan's room, stole his essay that he j...

Robin Source:  Wikipedia For this week's reading I am reading The book of Saints and Friendly Beast by Abbie Farwell Brown. This book is actually filled with separate stories of different saints and animal experiences and for this first reading I am reading 4 of them. The first story, Saint Kentigern and the Robin, is about some young children being jealous of Saint Kentigern at school because he is perfect in every way and is the the shool leader , Saint Servan, favorite pupil. So to try to get Saint Servan to not admire Saint Kentigern so much the other kids set traps for Kentigern to make him look bad or get in trouble. Many of the kids traps failed so they went to the extreme to get Kentigern in trouble by killing Servans pet robin and blaming Kentigern. Servan was furious and believed the kids saying Kentigern did it but Servan proved himself innocent when he prayed to heal the bird if he was innocent and the bird came back to life. What I question in this story is why ...

typewriter source:  Pixabay For my tech tip I will be talking about a typing test. The site  keyhero  allows you to type out a phrase and it will evaluate your typed words per minute and accuracy. My evaluation was 67.34 wpm with a 90.26% accuracy. I tried another site called  typing test  and on this site you type for a minute straight and then it give you the our words per minute speed with amount of errors and adjust the speed. For this site I got 82 wpm with 10 errors and adjusted it to be 72 wpm. I like the typing test site because it adjust your rate for the amount of mistake you have. Both these sites are great though if your looking to improve your typing speed. Personally I think my typing speed is perfect for what I need so I don't need to work on it anymore but it is fun to race myself.

pen and paper source: Wikimedia The two articles I read about feedback were  Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback  by Marshall Goldsmith and  Five Reasons to Stop Saying Good job  by Alfie Kohn. Both these articles talked about different things for feedback but both had the same idea of what feedback should be. Both articles sum up that feedback needs to be more than just a response but something that can be learned from. Five Reasons to Stop Saying Good Job talks more in detail on why praised and simple feedback is not great to do and how feedback should be something to learn from. To explain this children are used and it talks about how if feedback that is all just praise is used to a child their whole life then that can cause the child can turn in a "praise junkie" or ruin their sense of interest in doing things and just care for the reward thus only wanting to do stuff with a reward. The other article Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback talks about more on the...

Legendary Creature known as Big Foot source:  Deviantart My project about legendary creatures I have three main stories in mind that I would write about. Story 1:  Bigfoot The first possible story will be about a hiker who is going on this week long hike in some woods that is known for having strange sightings of a mysterious figure. On this trip the hiker will encounter this mysterious figure and it ended up being Bigfoot and he gets captured. The hiker will go through a long 7 days of trying to escape from Big foot before he is eaten alive Story 2:  Hidden Until Now The second possible story will be about Bigfoot but not just one Bigfoot, a whole civilization of Bigfoots. A couple of teens roaming in a forest will stumble on a hidden Bigfoot civilization that has been hidden for hundreds of years. The civilization will be very advanced and end up being revealed to the world because of these teenagers. Story 3: Legendary Meeting  In this last possible ...

Hera commanding the sun to set Source:  Un-Textbook This reading started out with the fight for the body of Patroclus. Hector took the armor of Patroclus which was from his enemy, Achilles, and wore it himself. This was extremely disrespectful to Achilles and I thought was a very big power move for Hector really helping the tension of the story as the climax approaches. During the story it talks about Achilles horses not listening to anyone and crying due to the death of Patroclus. I thought this was kind of weird and I don't see the point of telling this in the story. I thought the battle between Achilles and Hector was done very well. The detail about the fight made me feel as if I was there, also the way it was worded made me really be able to feel the tension between the two. A big focus that I want to have on my story is detail that allows the reader to really engage into the story. Also I thought that the killing of Hector really made the story better adding more suspense...

Clay pot of Achilles Embassy Source:  Un-Textbook " Homers Iliad " For my reading I decided to read "Homer's Iliad" because I have seen it before and learned a about it in high school so I figured I would read it again and really get in-depth with the story. This story is about the Trojan war which started from the kidnapping of the Helen who is the wife of Menelaus, the King of Sparta.Nine years after the start of this war the Greek army attacks a town allied with troy and captures two woman with one being the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The priest tries to buy his daughter back but the king declines so the priest ask the god Apollo for help which he does causing a chain reaction in events. This events eventually lead to a truce between sides but not without some tragic deaths. The first words of this entire story are "Once upon a time" which gave me the feeling as if I was about to read a big fairy tale type story. As I was reading through ...

Thumbs up and thumbs down Source:  Pixabay " A Fixed Mindset Could be Holding You Back " The first article I read was "A fixed Mindset Could be Holding You Back" in which it talked about how being focused on one thing and not wanting to explore or come out of your comfort zone can hurt you. People who will mess up on something and complain or feel bad about it instead of learning from their mistake will struggle way more than people who see the mistake and learn from it for future use. Also it talked about how praising a child constantly can actually hurt them more than hep them because then they will eventually feel like they are doing good at what they are doing or in life unless they are praised because they have a fixed mindset of whats good or not. " Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work " The second article I read was "Seven Ways to Crush Self-Doubt in Creative Work" which listed seven different ways. These seven ways al...

Here are four ideas that I chose to write about for my projects. Poseidon from Greek Mythology Source:  MaxPixel " Greek Mythology " Greek mythology has always been something that has caught my attention ever since I was younger. I always loved reading or hearing stories about the different gods and different scenarios or events that happened with each one. Also since I've always have had an interest I actually have pretty good knowledge of the different gods but there is still a lot that I don't know. So for me it was a for sure thing that I would talk about the gods for one of my projects. For a story I could create a great war between the gods or maybe a spin-off of the bachelor with god's type story, there is quite a few different things I could do. " Alice in Wonderland " Alice in Wonderland is such a famous and classic story that I knew I had to write about it. I always loved this crazy fantasy world that the story talks about. There is s...