The Curator's Follies

I bet that most of you don't know what a curator does, you might have heard it before corny movie about mummy or you might have heard it from a museum tour guide. From that context you'd probably assume that the curator is like a director for a museum. Unfortunately, if you assumed that you'd be incorrect. The curator would be more like a care taker, than a director; the curator's job is to oversee the creation and the well-being of the artifacts and exhibits. This week we learned about "how to be curators". To co-exist with what we are learning about the revolution, we made exhibits describing the benefits and the misfortunes of the revolution.


Our group's (group D)  objectives was to create a exhibit that would inform the audience of child labor in the revolution. We were given six documents which we had to analyze and source. After that we started working on the project and implementing the document to it, this is when the sourcing comes in handy because it gives you a sense of what information relevant, and which should go out the window. We the created the images and captions for the "exhibit", by printing out the pictures and the captions for the pictures. After we finished making the captions and over coming a couple of "hindrances" we decided that the title "The Condemning of the Innocent: child labor in the revolution" I personally didn't like that title because it's in the future tense, which is illogical because we are talking about events in the past, not in the present. Aside from the title aggravating me grammatically, i thought the poster was pretty good. We had a center caption that explained what was the Industrial Revolution and how it effected the welfare of the children. Surrounding the center piece there are pictures and captions showing how the revolution had a negative effect on the children. connecting all of the pictures are mine carts, which I felt were a bit unproductive because they didn't seem the have a distinct path or seemed to be orderly either.

Group A's project was about the advancements in the textile industry. Their titles were a bit amusing and very punny. It said that the Industrial revolution had huge impacts on the textile industry. These improvements include invention the spinning jenny in 1764 that increased the rate of the creation of yarn, followed by the British hand loom which also significantly increased the productivity of the factories. Next we had group B's steam engine themed exhibit. Their exhibit consisted of how the steam engine functioned and how it  helped improve the trade industry. After that their was group Cs exhibit of the pollution of the revolution. This poster to how the revolution caused the environment suffered throughout the revolution. A nice touche to the project was the polluted river in the back ground which gradually got more dirty as the facts came by. The last exhibit that we visited was group E's "Spinning into slavery" poster. I actually liked this poster best even over ours because of how neat it is. It showed how the revolution created a rapid increase in the population of slaves as the revolution progressed and the invention of the cotton gin.

    

It's All A Stain

Today we learned about the industrial revolution. The essential question was "What was 'revolutionary' about industrialization?" In the lesson we were separated into groups and given a field that was advanced upon in the revolution, to which they took notes on. The groups then shared their note with all the other groups. 

During the Industrial Revolution, the field of transportation drastically improved. Rail road travel became much more preferable when the steam engine, it allowed carriages to be pulled across rail road tracks. Land travel was greatly improved by the creation of the transcontinental rail road. The invention of the steam engine used to power vehicles removed the necessity to travel within bodies of water. Freighters powered by the steam engine increased the cargo carrying capability on ships and marine vehicles by 2000%. Robert Fulton invention of the steam engine boat (which had a max speed of 5 mph, no joke look it up), greatly increased commerce with land locked cities.With all of the efficient commerce, the global economy sky rocketed.

The other great improvements of the Industrial Revolution was in textiles and clothing manufacturing. With the invention of the flying shuttle, the water wheel and chemical coloring, the efficiency, the quality, and the speed in making textiles took a huge leap. The invention of the flying

shuttle by John Kay, greatly improved the weaving rate among the workers. Before the introduction of chemical coloring, the coloring of clothe was created using stale urine to provide all the colors of the clothe. The aforementioned water wheel and later steam engine also heavily improved on the speed of the creation of textiles. Before, they had to rely on water power generated from fast moving waters usually located more north.

 The Industrial Revolution revolutionized the way products were created, and how people lived their lives. gave the opportunity for great things, but also much more deadlier weapons to civilization. Without the inventions and revolutions of the Industrial Revolution, the world would a truly different place. Image citation: "Dye Vat." Flickr. Yahoo!, n.d. Web. 11 Sept. 2014. .

Save the Tree Octopus!

This year we started off with a refresher on media literacy. We review on how to efficiently search topics, and how to evaluate if the site is trustworthy as a source. We also learn the definitions of accuracy, authenticity, and reliability, and judged a website based on those merits. To re-introduce ourselves to efficient searching, we used the "Google a Day" feature on Google.

The Google a day feature is like charades, but more oriented towards using Google. The game starts with three vague questions about History, Pop culture, and Science, and you have to use Google to find the answers to these predicaments. The trick is that it takes more than one search to find the answer to the dilemmas. It's actually very fun to follow he trail of bread crumbs that Google leaves for you, one minute you could be looking up a well renown director, and soon enough, you'll be looking famous clowns in the 50's. n the down side, the questions can get very irksome. One very persistent question was, "Under modern classification, what clade do birds belong to?” the correct answer was "diapsid", which unfortunately for us, was not listed in Wikipedia, but overall the Google a Day Feature is definitely worth checking out.

The second thing we learned about that day was,authenticity, reliability and accuracy. Accuracy is how truthful and up to date information is. Authenticity is the genuineness of the information, or if it is what it seems to be. Reliability is how dependable the information is. To test these three essential words, we used it on a website, a website dedicated to the endangered species, the "Pacific Northwest tree octopus". On outside, the website actually makes the "Pacific Northwest tree octopus" sound real, but we must use to three big words to find out the trust worthiness of this site. The Site first fails with, Accuracy, because it mentions, that the Sasquatch preys on the creature. The website also fails on authenticity, because when consulting other websites, there is no such thing as a "Pacific Northwest tree octopus. The Website also fails its last test reliability, which was really obvious because since when was yeti a language? Everyone knows that yeti is just a Sasquatch dialect.

 Overall this was a very fun way to kick off this year.

Tools of the Great

An open letter back to John Green and Mrs. Gallagher

     

Classroom of Students

  Great people don’t appear out of nowhere. They have to build themselves from scratch, and the most essential tool needed for this is the influence of a great teacher. My third grade teacher Mr. Torenal was the best teacher I've had so far. He was interesting, his lessons were always amusing as well as informative. He was also very legitimate so everyone followed what he wanted. A teacher can be great in many ways. The two qualities that are essential in my opinion is the teacher must be creative, and respected by his pupils. A teacher must be creative in his teachings so their disciples don’t get bored and lose interest. Equally as important, the teacher must also command the respect of the learners, so they will believe in the teacher's words. This year to support me, could you give a little more hands on experience to you lesson plans. Lectures are bearable, but not in large quantities.

       I agree with John Green's open letter to students he addresses that it is our duty to repay society for the education that society had loaned us by making our community a better place. Society gave us our education as a gift and we should repay society by making it better. My goal for this year is to make the honor role at least three out of the four opportunities given. To reach my goal, I will probably study more often and use a lot less time procrastinating.

Link to video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78PnPd-V-A&feature=youtu.be
Link to picture site: http://smartdatacollective.com/brett-stupakevich/32123/data-analytics-study-uncovers-billions-potential-revenue