MWA 1 SLOs

The activity for Journal 2 helped a lot with understanding content management. My group decided to compare and contrast Coolmathgames and Khan Academy. They are both websites that appeal to students in different ways. Coolmathgames was made for students to cool off or relax. Khan Academy is a more professional site that focuses on the education of students. Khan Academy was a lot more organized and formal to make it easily accessible. This taught me that I need to be aware of the structure of my projects. I need to make it easy to navigate and easy to read just like how Khan Academy has done for their users. This activity also prepared me for navigating through my sources. It helped me notice the strategies that my sources use to display information. This includes writing style and infographics. For my topic of animal rights, most of my sources resorted to posting pictures of cute animals or animals that are disabled to appeal to the user's emotions.

My written communication has improved since the beginning of the semester. This is because of the padlet activities that we do in-class. We have to analyze a source and understand it fully. We then have to present what we have learned to our peers by writing it into the padlet then presenting it aloud. This practice has reflected onto my project as I was able to read through my sources and write effective summaries that included the necessary information that my audience needed to understand the topic or general idea of the article. I also remembered to keep in mind that my audience are not experts in these topics so I need to simplify/explain the terms and process I used so they could grasp what was discussed in the article. One of our assigned readings also mentioned that everyone has different understandings for everything and to keep that in mind when writing. Before submitting my annotated bibliography, I also made sure that my writing was clear and easy to follow. I first read it aloud to myself and then I had my family members read it to ensure that it was legible. In conclusion, it is very important that your writing targets your audience. You have to know that your audience have different understandings of every topic so it is best to explain your topics to the fullest extent so that everyone in your audience can understand what is being stated, 

For this project, I had the opportunity to ask questions about the type of sources we could use. We discussed that it is best to have a mixture of scholarly articles and non-profit websites. I also learned that it is good practice to find sources within the past 5 years to utilize current content.I managed to find 3 scholarly articles and two different websites. What I didn't realize is that one of my scholarly articles was out of date and that one of my websites was actually just a blog post. I noticed this the day before this assignment was due and I already wrote everything I need to for these sources as well. This was a little hiccup I had in my writing process. I was just happy to find a source that had what I wanted. This is not a good practice because the source could have the information I wanted, but it does not mean that it is reliable or factual. I did eventually find sources that fit the guidelines that still discussed what the previous two did. I learned from my mistake that I should not just use any source that agrees with my opinion and that I need to think about who is presenting this information and if it's valid. For example, one of the original sources I had was a blog post that simply had what I was looking for. Just think, anyone could have made that post whether they are an expert in the topic or not. In general, I learned that it is best to use either Google Scholar or JSTOR to find reliable sources. Both of these databases have thousands of scholarly articles that you can read and use in your papers.