Flat world reflection

1. The thing I liked best about this project was the podcasts of everyones story. The reason I liked this was because it allowed us to get to know the people who's story we listened to even better. One of the main goals of this project was not only to write a paper but also to interact from different kids around the world. I learned a lot about them by reading their papers but I learned the most about them by listening to other kid's stories. Listening to stories allowed me to do two things: First, it allowed me get to know the person better by hearing their voice. It's like an aim conversation verses a phone coversation. If you meet someone for the first time over the phone, you feel like you know the person a lot better than if you just type to them on aim. Second, it allows us to realize what parts of their story are most important. Because we have different cultures, they would emphasize different things than we would in their stories. By listening to the story we can tell what is important by how they read it. This also makes the story more enjoyable. The podcasts were very fun and helpful.

2. The thing I liked the least about this projects was that we had to correct a different thing each week on the other persons paper. One week it was word choice and the next week it was sentence fluency. I didn't like this because I don't think it allowed people to be as helpful as possible. There might have been some people that realized that one part of a story needed a lot of work but because they were assigned to correct something else, didn't fix it. This is bad because the person won't get the best feedback possible which will make their story not as good as it could possibly be. It is also bad because if we are correcting something that the paper already does very good, there's really nothing we could do. We should be able to correct whatever we felt like needed the most work.

3. One surprising thing about some other students was how blatantly some plagiarized. Some students almost exactly copied famous fairy tails such as Goldie Locks and the Three Bears. They used the same characters and changed only the smallest details. They only changed it after three or four people said how much alike it was to these fairy tails. And even after they tried to fix it, you could still tell the concept was the same even though they changed the characters and a few other things. I was very surprised at how lax other schools plagiarism policies were.

4. Honestly, I don't think that this project didn't helped my writing that much because it was reviewed in a way that we will probably not need in the future. It took us six weeks to correct our paper which is a lot longer than we will normally have. I also feel that the feedback I recieved was not ground-breaking. The stuff they told me to correct was stuff I already knew I had to correct but I had to wait until the certain week to do it. And sometimes the feedback that I received was just lazy. For example, the week we were correcting word choice, someone told me to use the thesaurus so that I could have bigger words. The only thing it helped me realize was that I should pay more attention to having all six categories in my writing the next time I write a fictional paper. Overall, I don't think that this project helped me become a better writer.

5. The most challenging part of this project for me was making this story interesting. Because I chose a story that had a very good point but was not very interesting, it was hard to add fictional parts to the story to make it more interesting while at the same time making sure that I still get my point across. The main point of my story was that my dad was honest and returned money he had been overchanged when he was very young the next day he found even more money lying on the street. It was hard to make interesting because I had to think of a believable but exciting event that made my dad decide to return the money and realize that what he was doing was stealing. It was hard to be creative but believable at the same time.

6. The most important advice I can give to future students is to make sure that you have pretty much your whole story done before it starts getting corrected. If you don't, not only will you start to fall behind but you're story will not end up as good in the end. When people see a partially done story they don't correct very well since it's not done. Also, for the rest of the story you hadn't finished, that part will miss some very important corrections which will cause that part to not be as good as possible. Even if you're story is not great, write out the whole thing before you start recieving corrections. That will make sure you won't fall behind and you're story will be even better because you recieve better corrections.

7. Overall, I think that with a few tweaks in terms of how we correct the papers, this project can be very good. It allows us to get to know other cultures and other kids at the same time as we do school work. Because of the interaction it could become a very fun way to get you're story corrected instead of just having the teacher correct it and just hand it back to you. It would also be very helpful because we would learn how to correct other people's papers better which would allow us to correct our own papers better in the future. Right now this is a fun project and with a few changes with the way we correct it could be a fun, and very helpful writing project.