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Reflection Creating a final portfolio is like making something that can be left behind. It contains all your hard work, struggles, and successes throughout the semester. Its what you leave behind once you are done with the class. That being said, when you make a final portfolio, you cant be messy. It has to be just right. It shows all your potential with your assignments, how thorough you are, and how hard you are willing to work. So, I hope my final portfolio displays that. I worked hard on it and all the work that it contains. For my portfolio, I decided to use the website Weebly. I had to use it for my English class last semester and it was the only one I knew how to use, so I went with that. I consider Weebly to be like a blog. You can publish whatever you want on it and add personal touches to it. Thats what I did with mine. On each page I added different quotes that I really liked. Pictures just add something to a page, so I decided to use quotes because they are a big part of my life. Also, in order to help the progression of my website, I used another one called Scribd. This is a site where a person can download documents and change them into an HTML code and embed that code into a page on the website. It was a very useful site to know. The only problem with this website was the issue of copying and pasting. Whenever I tried to copy one of my documents and then paste the contents onto my page, the spacing and lining would mess up so I would have to go back and fix each individual mistake. However, thats pretty much the only problem I encountered with the website. Its pretty easy to use. It was definitely a task trying to gather all the work Ive done throughout the semester. I had to figure out what file I saved it under, or if it was in my notebook, or whether I had to finish a task or redo it.

Building an e-portfolio made me realize how much work Ive really done this semester. Everything was pretty spaced out, but it ended up accumulating to a good bit. It showed my progress throughout the semester, and how Ive grown as a writer and English student. Id say Ive learned some new things and have grown even better. I accomplished a lot this semester. As each person reads my portfolio, I want them to be aware of the fact that I tried my best on everything. I put in a lot of effort on each individual assignment, for the portfolio especially. I tried to customize it to reflect more of who I am as a person, not just how my writing is. One of the main projects we did this semester was the Image Project. For this, we were told to find ten images that related in some way to power. Power can be perceived in so many different ways, so for this project we were able to incorporate our own definition of the word and examples of what we thought portrayed power the best. For mine, I had three main categories: child abuse, natural disasters, and inspiration. Child abuse is a straight forward display of power over the victim. Natural disasters are considered powerful because they are so large and affect such a wide range of people. Last, I think inspirational things have power over people. Well, they do for me personally. I can read a quote and feel empowered to do better afterwards. Quotes make people feel good and inspire them to do better and achieve more. In addition to finding pictures, we also had to discuss and analyze them. I dont think Ive ever gone that far into detail with one picture. But it was good to find out some of the background information of it. Our second big project was the Annotated Bibliography. I think this project was much tougher than the Image Project. The other one required a lot of detail, but this one even more so. For this, we had to choose a topic and find seven sources that went along with it. Then discuss each source and write a reflection. For my bibliography, I decided to do animal abuse. The two major things I wanted to research were why people abuse animals and the correlation between

animal abuse and crime records. I was able to learn a lot by doing this project, things I hadnt know before. I decided to pick animal abuse because it is something that I have very strong beliefs about. I do not tolerate it and I believe punishments should be more harsh if someone is caught abusing an animal. This project was tougher because we had to summarize each source. Im not that great at summarizing, so I had to work on this for a bit longer. But overall, I think I did pretty good on it. Another task that we did was the Intervention Questions Task. This was where we watched a few episodes about the show called Intervention. The individuals on the show had some kind of problem that was severely affecting themselves and their family and friends, so they finally decided enough was enough and called an interventionist to try and put a stop to the harmful behavior. We watched an episode about Allison, who cut herself and purposely harmed her body. After we were given three topics and told to either support or refute them. The topics made you think because they werent typical. Also with this, we had to write the difference between persuasion and argument and then argue on why Allisons past had everything to do with the way she turned out. All of the assignments weve done this semester required critical thinking out of the normal range. If I had to say, I think Ive done really well this semester. Ive kept up with all the work, completed it on time, and really worked hard on it. My attendance was great, one absence away from perfect. And when we worked with partners, I always worked well and we had great discussions. I liked that we got to work together so much. It allowed us to communicate with each other more and share our own opinions. I learned a lot this semester, about things Ive never even known before. I learned what trace and paradigm were and how to do it, and how to formulate a Rogerian argument. I also learned how to be more self-sufficient. In this class, the

students were responsible for not getting behind on their work, so I learned to do all my work on time and not get behind. If you finish everything when it should be due, then you dont have such a problem compiling it all together. Overall, I liked this semester. I liked that big assignments were broken down into little ones so we didnt get overwhelmed by too much work. You made it easier on us. So, now that this semester has drawn to an end, I am glad that I was put into this English class. I learned a lot and was taught a different way of teaching, one that isnt so tough on students.