Inspire

How are you inspired?

Definition of "Inspire": 1. Fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. 2. Create (a feeling, especially a positive one) in a person. 

I am inspired daily. For me, I am inspired by many different things, not just a single thing. I am inspired by different people, music, artwork, technology, and just all sorts of different things that I see just in my everyday life. The things that inspire make up who I am. The reason that is, is because I think that the things that inspire me have a really big impact in my life. 

Outside of my family, Mrs. Miller is probably one of my top inspirers. She inspires me to blog, to tweet, to read, and many, many other things that I probably wouldn't do on my own.

I love to create art and decorate almost anything. I created this during one of our art classes, and hung it up on my wall to give me inspiration everyday. It inspires me to do what I love to do- which is to create.

There are a WHOLE bunch of different singers/music that inspires me since I listen to a big variety of music, but I would have to say that Taylor Swift inspires me the most. I don't really know how to describe how music inspires me, but I would just say that it makes up who I am. 

Twitter is something that inspires me daily. There are SO many things that I see on twitter all the time that inspire me. There are so many books that I see that I would like to read, so many different websites that have things on them that inspire me. 

Last of all, these people inspire me all the time. But the thing that has brought us together is what this picture is all about- She's The First. We have all come together and have accomplished so much together and seeing all of the girls in the other countries just yearning for an education and to grow up and become a leader just inspires me. It is so cool to look back on from where we started with out group and how far we have become.

So to narrow it down, there are many things that inspire you, you probably just didn't really think about it. There are so many things that inspire me and just make me unique and makes each and every single person unique in their own way.

Definition source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inspire

Twitter

I absolutely LOVE using twitter! It is probably one of the easiest ways to I know to communicate what you have to say so quickly through the internet.

I first learned about and started twitter about a year ago. I learned about twitter from my school librarian Shannon Miller (@shannonmmiller). At first I made my own twitter and just kind of tweeted whatever. But now, just recently I made 2 new twitter accounts for different purposes.

The first one that I made was from an idea that I got from another student that goes to my school. The purpose of this account that I made was to remind my grade about up-coming tests that we have. I just started this maybe about a week ago and so far it has been going good. I really hope that this helps students remember when we have tests better, because I know that students in my grade check social media websites quite often, and thought that it would maybe remind them to get off of the computer and start studying!

The second account that I made, I made just yesterday. The purpose of this account is just for educational purposes, so that way I can have my own personal account for personal things, and then still be tweeting educational things. I LOVE having this twitter and personally think that I have used it quite a bit for only having it for one night. I like to tweet different websites for teachers or parents or anybody who wants anything educational.

You can follow me on my educational account here: https://twitter.com/#!/edugirlvm

P.S. Thanks SOOOOOOO much Mrs. Miller for making such an educational impact on my life! :)

She's the First

She's the First is a non-profit organization that I joined this past May. There are about 8 other 8th graders that do this group with me and then our "leader" is our wonderful librarian Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller started this whole group by connecting with the CEO (Tammy Tibbetts) after winning the Connecting People Shorty Award this year. After that, Mrs. Miller and Tammy connected through Skype and Twitter and there were a couple of us that were interested in doing this and so we started it. After that a couple of other people joined with us and we started fundraising! What She's the First is, is its a organization that help girls in other countries get an education, so that they can be the first in their family to do what they want and get a job. So, what we do is we have fundraisers to earn money for the girl that we are sponsoring. She's the First*{Van Meter} has had a couple of different fundraisers, and we have raised over $1,200 in the past 6 months. It takes $1,000 to pay for 1 year of the girl that we are sponsorings tuition. We are now going to be sponsoring this girl for the last year of her high school year. Here is an animoto video that I made that shows all of the different schools/projects that She's the First sponsors:

Animoto

Animoto is a really fun website that you can make videos on. It works very nice because you can add pictures, text, and music and they put it all together for you. I love to make book projects and other videos using animoto. Its fun to explore the different templates that you can choose from to make your video out of. They have a whole bunch of different variety of music that you can choose from, or you can use your own music from your computer. 

Its fun to make videos on animoto especially if you make a video of one of your vacations that you took. I think that animoto is a very easy thing to do once you learn the basics of it, but other then that, you can make videos in 5-10 minutes depending on how much information you would like to put in your video. Sometimes if you have lots of free time, its fun to take your time and make a really nice video and add lots of details to your video. :)

You can visit the site: http://animoto.com/

Google Sketch-Up

We use Google Sketch-up a lot in our Virtual Reality class. Right now we are using to create what we think schools and the world around us are going to look like in 10 years from now with technology. We are going to be doing different things like the classrooms, the cafeteria, a sports stadium, and other things like that. I am going to be creating the classroom view. We had watched a video about a day of glass in our previous class, and that had helped with coming up with ideas (Video: http://youtu.be/6Cf7IL_eZ38). If you actually think about what technology would be like in 10 years from now it is kind of fun to see what you can brainstorm. There are going to be a lots of different things that will probably be unexpected.

I like to use Google Sketch-up to do different projects such as building houses, or something like the project that we are doing. It is a very neat software and even though it takes a while to understand, it is a very cool thing to use. I would suggest Google Sketch-up if you have a lot of time on your hands, if you like to build things, or even if you don't have THAT much time on your hands, I still think that it would be fun for you to do if you just took chunks of time to work on something like this.

Welcome!

Hi, my name is Alissa. I am a student in 8th grade at Van Meter Community Schools. I love to blog, play sports, read, write, draw, be around friends, technology, and other sorts of things like that. I made this blog so I can tell people about the 1 to 1 school that I go to. I will tell about different tools that we use on our Mac laptops, and different websites and applications that we use on our laptops at school. I hope that I can tell you about things that you haven't known before! :)