Homework (October 20th, 2014)

Guten Tag everyone, how are you? I hope you are doing well :) Today's topic is about evernote, google slide, and my R&P. So now let's start :D

1. Evernote

 Actually, I've started using evernote some months before on my i Phone. The application for phones is also very useful, because you can see some large files, such as exel or pdf clearly on your phone. Sometimes I use it in order to check my shift of part time jobs.

 During today's lecture, we downloaded evernote web clipper on our google crome. I have never used evernote on PC, so it was totally new to me. By using evernote web clipper, you can clip the whole website, bookmark, articles in your evernote easily. Moreover, you can also clip a screenshot of a website and devise the picture online! It was very surprising for me, because it enables me to save much time :) I don't need a long process (taking a screenshot → download in desktop → upload again) anymore! It's awesome :D The other good thing is you can find your files easily according to dates or searching on your evernote. I'm sure that I will continue to use evernote online in order to gather files for making presentations or other stuff.

2. Presentation

 I watched C.R.A.P videos which are provided by one of our tallest ELA teachers, Rab!C.R.A.P stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. These videos show that how you can improve your presentations or slides effectively by using visual effects. There are 4 things that you should consider when you make presentations. ①Contrast: Strong contrast in color is better to see and impress than weak contrast. ②Repetition: Font, color, font size, pictures should be the same through a presentation in order to keep consistency. ③Alignment: In order to make your presentation more attractive, you should arrange words and pictures effectively. ④Proximity: In a slide, words should have appropriate distances in order to avoid confusions among listeners. All these techniques are very useful to improve presentations. So, I'd like to pay attention to these points for final projects.

3. My topic

 For my final project, I'd like to write about funeral in Japan. However, still I can not find any good sources to support my argument. Maybe I should change my topic... I don't know. I hope I can write a better essay compare to the last one. I'll do my best! See ya!

Homework (October 13th, 2014)

Hi guys, how are you? Today's R&P lecture made me surprised very much, because there are so many useful techniques for study.

My 1st duty is to find featured articles on wikipedia and finally I found out that an article about "Stonewall riots", which is one of the biggest gay movements in the United States, is actually one of the most high quality articles. In my latest essay, I wrote about same-sex marriage, so this article was very helpful to understand, how those LGBT movements happened in the past and how the government treated with those actions at that time. I think this article is very sophisticated, because this has enough, clear references at the end of the article, so there are no question marks or signs which say "This article needs additional citations for verification" or so force. Moreover, this article is very well categorized and explained in detail, so if you are interested in LGBT rights or gay movements, please check the following homepage address.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

In addition to this, if you are looking for FA sources, you can find them easily from the following wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

On this page, featured articles or topics are listed alphabetically or based on themes, so you can find high quality sources, which are related to your essay or interest, much more quickly.

Secondly, I'd like to talk about zotero. This time was the 2nd time to make citations by using zotero and generally speaking, I was able to use zotero appropriately. However, when I want to do citations from Japanese newspaper resources, (ex. The Japan Times) sometimes zotero doesn't work well. The place, where the author's name should be, becomes somehow blank and when I use shortcut with Ctrl+Shift+A/V, then the title of the articles is pasted  on the document. I'm not sure whether there are certain ways to solve those problems quickly, but people have to sometimes type author's names or necessary information by themselves.

I'd like to continue using these techniques to improve my research and study. Thank you for your time :) See ya!