Megan’s blog

I decided to do horses as my topic. 

The first thing that I did was create a series of pages on my wiki. I stated out trying to think of a way to do a project on horses in general butt as I went about completing my project I decided that my project would be better if I just focused on the competitive riding that I compete in regularly. I created a survey and the first first go around I got some very crude responses. I decided that I would go in and change my survey so that people were required to leave their names and I recieved much more appropriate responses.  I think that if I ever use quia.com again then I will be sure to require names.  This will lead to more appropriate answers. 

I discovered that people thought that riding was not a sport because they are under the false impression that all that you have to do is sit and the horse will do everything for you. 

mechanics- I found that it was very easy to create the survey. I found that it was easy to post the survey. I however decided that it would have been easier if I had been able to find blogs about horses that were viewed every day.  

results- I think that it was easy to get access to the results despite what I had thought. I think that the results were exactly what I expected to get. 

If I could change anything about quia, I would make it easier to create and allow  unlimited lines or space that the respondent can take in their response. 

This year we have done both a podcast and are currently working on a quia.com survey.              Tools I have used this semester flikr- we have set up accounts but I am not sure if we ever really used them google- in google we have used the calendar and have pulled the RSS feeds for calendars that we need to keep up with; we have used iGoogle for many things for example we both created a page in our iGoogle that was for politics and we each pulled RSS feeds for politics in different countries. After we had a politics we created a page related to what ever we wanted.   We then worked in google reader and set up feeds so that we could  get to information from different sites without having to search all over the web for the page.             One week while we ware working with Mr. Wingate, he helped us set up our email so that it would forward to our cell phones. I have used this quite a lot because sometimes my mom has to tell me something but I am not on my email when she sends it. If I have my phone on then I can simply look at it and read the first several lines of what she has sent me. 

have decided to do something related to horses which are a big part of my life. I think that given my passion, I am going focus on explaining how big a commitment it is to get a horse into shape to be able to preform at its best at any competition. I think that this will be a great way to inform people who think that all a person has to do to ride a horse is sit in the saddle and hold on to the reins. The reason that getting the point across that riding requires more than just sitting on a horse and expecting the horse to know exactly what you want him to do is so important to me is because whenever I meet someone new and I tell them that my favorite sport is horseback riding I tend to get a response along the lines of ” Horseback riding is not a sport..” When I hear responses like that I am tempted to say that just because what you see on televison . I think that this is a common misconception because most people do not see horseback riding as a sport.

I think that I would get a very interesting set of data if I were to survey the entire upper school on this topic. I do not know how I would go about interviewing the entire school.

       Last week we started the week off by setting our phones up so that we could get our emails from our Lovett email addresses and made it so that the email would be saved on first class but also be forwarded to our cell phones. I thought that this was really  useful because we cant always get to a computer and check emails so if someone sends us something then  it would get automatically forwarded to our phones. This has proven very helpful because over the past week since we have set it up to do that I have had several important emails sent to me that I would not have seen until it was possibly too late had it not been for my phone.  

    With Google calender we set it up so that we could simply send a text message to a number and they would send us any events for that day or the next day. This was useful to me because as I would find out about a test or quiz I would send a text to the number that was given to us by google calenders and they would add it to the current day. I however, did not figure out how to put an event on a future day by way of text message. I think that had I figured out how to do this then the process would have taken less time going back and  moving events around that I had already put on my calender. 

The next thing we did was sync iCal with Google calenders and I never really figured out how to do that because when we started to do this I did not have my computer because it was at home charging and I did not have my iCal as a result of that. When I finally got my computer back in class we had gotten too far into this that I could not catch up. I did attempt to sync the two but had no luck. I think that had I actually been able to sync the two then I would not have to look in more than one place for my calenders. 

After we messed around with  the calendars we moved on to flikr. Whien we were using flicker he tried to show us how to upload a picture from our phones to our flikr account. However, I don’t think anyone had the capabilities on their phone to really try this out. I think that had we had the capabilities from our phones that this would have been an excellent tool to use so that we could share our pictures with others.

Of all of the things that I mentioned, the thing I feel is going to be the most helpful is having email be forwarded to our cell phones because there are days when I do not have time to check my email but I almost always have my cell phone on me. The reason that this is useful is because instead of having to check my email every day I can just check my text messages on my phone every now and then during the day. By doing this I am able to continue what I was doing and not have to stop and go to a computer and sign in to my email.

I think that all of these things help to make our lives less dependent on having a computer 24 hours a day because we cant always take a computer or laptop where ever we go but we can take a cell phone with us much easier then we could take a computer or laptop. Even though sometimes to be able to read the entire email you may have to be at a computer when it is forwarded to a cell phone you can get the general idea of what the email is saying and later when you have time you can go into your email and actually read the entire thing.

I think that the teenagers in the United States should be able  to choose weather or not they want to go to school. However I think that teenagers should have a minimum number of days that they have to go to class a year. If this was the case then I think that teens may be less likely to drop out of school. Even if this sounds crazy I think that students should at least be able to attend a class online if they do not go to school for what ever reason that day.

I think that if a student does not want to go to school, lets say they were sick, then they could just go online to their teachers website and be able to participate in the discussion for that days class.  This may seem extremely expensive but is it really? I mean the average American family has a computer or a laptop of some sort at home. Wouldn’t it be easy for a teacher to just broadcast their class on a common website that all teachers broadcast there classes on?

I think that this would be just as productive in high schools as it is in some colleges. In fact I know of some people who in high school do not have to go to school to take a class. One of my friends told me that she knows a girl who is taking a math class online.

I think that teens would be more willing to go to class if we could choose what time we wanted to go to class as they can in college. The reason I think that high schools should be structured this way is because if they convert to a configuration that resembles that of College then teens would be in a since better prepared for college.

I think that if we do this then the teens will have a higher success rate at college because they will not have to spend the first semester trying to figure out their classes and when they are.

I was very confused as to what the point of this was. I never really understood what I was supposed to learn from it. In my oppenion I Think that I would have benifited more from just reading a list then doing this activity.

I have added several plugins and widgits to my blog. I have added the blog calander which I hope will help me keep track of when I have posted what blogs and when I have not blogged at all.

I have added the blog roll, catagories, archives, calander, recent post, recent comments, and tags
I hope that this will all help me stay on top of my blogs from now on

Even though when you see a movie in theaters it appears that it is just the actors and the camera man in the room but really there are dozens of people that work behind the scenes.

I don’t know if you have been to any movies lately?

If you have then have you noticed the preview for Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys?

Well my house is in that movie!

Well I guess I should start by explaining how my house was chosen for the movie!

One day during the second semester of last year my mom and I had just gotten home from school and I had gotten the mail as I always do on school days and I noticed that there was a folded up piece of paper not inside but on the mail box.

At first we thought that it was a scam because we never thought that anyone would want to film a movie in someone elses house

During the days that they were filming at my house I spent one night at a hotel across the street from the FOX. While I was there I was surprised that I was able to do any homework at all.