First of several videos made for a class. I had a lot of technical difficulties this week, including final cut on my laptop stop working so this video ended up being a result of me playing with imovie (which i hate)
*the second url is a typo, mentoringmoments802.blogspot is the correct link*
Yesterday was my DREAM program's first friday of programing! it was "stuplenderful"! We had at least 20 new mentors coming to check out our program hopefully at least 6 will join and stick around for all four years of college!!! We had a party in the Fireside lounge at Champlains campus, had pizza supplied by the Center for Service and Civic Engagement, and of course fun, games, and toilet paper supplied by DREAM!!!
It was not only the first Friday, but the first time Ive felt comfortable about leaving my mentee Sam*...
She was totally the highlight of the party once i told her we need all these new recruits to see how much fun DREAM is and to get them to become mentors! But of course she gave death glares and said "Nope not gonna happen... lets not talk about it" when anyone brought up that I was a senior and was graduating. But I got her to point out two or three recruits she liked and I'll find her a new mentor. She doesnt get how awesome its gonna be to have two mentors this year!
This is my mentee being mummified by mentor Talia and recruit Colleen (who is her current number one pick to become her new mentor.. shhh).
At the end of the day I gave Sam her 13th birthday gift. its an engraved necklace signed your mentor and friend, Laura... its awesome and she loved it! I wishhhhh i was going to be around next Friday. it makes me nervous not to be there or have jess there... hopefully she'll bond amazingly with a recruit and she'll talk to me about it the next day when I visit her (honestly cant go a week w/o seeing her).
*mentees name changed
The printer wasn't working for my to print a paper on Blogger vs. Tumblr! I figured the next best thing would be to post my write up on Blogger
I’m a blogger. I always have been and always will be. I loved DeadJournal when I was in high school, got active on Blogger my first few years in college, have always loved twitter for micro blogging, and now I love Tumblr. It’s the best of all the worlds!
DeadJournal you had the ability to follow other people’s journals and have it show up on one screen but also it was focused on lengthy/wordy blogs like Blogger. When I started using Blogger I liked it because it was much more user friendly and you didn’t have to have someone invite you to it, but if I wanted to see my friends blogs I would have to go to their page. The easiest way to follow them is to set up an RSS feed, and it wasn’t appealing to me. I wanted it all to be on the same website. I really missed that about DeadJournal.
I know on Blogger there are specific blogs, but the majority are people who are frustrated with something, and use it as a space to be negative, argue, or vent. I’ve always said if I’m not using Blogger for a class, I find myself venting, rambling, getting caught up in unnecessary frustration.
A lot of people call Tumblr a Twitter-ized blog. Unlike Blogger but like Twitter, it is easy to follow people you like, share/re-blog content, have short posts, quotes, links, pictures, and like Facbeook, you can like things.
Tumblr gives writers the same pleasure as Blogger, you can write as much as you would like. But on Blogger to have a post that is just a picture, or just a link with no descriptions, doesn’t look right. It is all much more fast, direct, and smooth. The reblogging ability is what appeals the most to be about Tumblr. Sometimes I’m not in a creative mood but I want to give my followers something to remind them I’m out there. I can look through other people’s pictures or writing and share it with my followers. When you re-blog it shows a link to the original blog so you don’t even have to worry about not giving someone credit for your blog!
I would have to say people’s biggest complains about Tumblr is the same on Twitter. There are too many teens wasting the time and space with nonsense. But like twitter, you can get around it! On Tumblr it is as easy as clicking “Explore more tags” and it has the most popular tags like, politics, fashion, comics, animals, education, the activity of that tag, and the top editor on that tag as a great starting person to follow. It’s really amazing to be able to follow political blogs from all over the world and share their information with my friends.
My last favorite thing about Tumblr is very similar to Blogger. On both of these tools you can create multiple blogs with the same user account. I have four blogs on Tumblr and more than I can count on Blogger. I have a personal Tumblr but my other three are focused on mentoring, Harry Potter, and my cat.
If I had to keep only one blogging tool, it would be Tumblr, if I had to keep only one social media tool, it would be Tumblr!
My mentoring program’s first event this semester!!! If you go to Champlain College and have an interest in kids/teaching/mentoring please stop by to meet the kids and ask questions!
Shes the closest thing I’ll ever get to having a little sister. My freshman year she had just turned 10 and now shes 13 and that TOTALLY FREAKS ME OUT! I cant believe I just went to her 13th Bday party!
Because I said I would use any of the kids names I’ll be calling her Sam.
This is a picture from the day I asked her to be my mentee on a culminating trip to Sturbridge Village in Mass.
I totally love her more than she realizes and you’ll get to see my journey this year which is going to be very hard on me. Because I’m a senior this is our last year together, and I was her first mentor. Ever since my freshman year she always asks me when I’ll be graduating. I’m trying to build a stronger friendship relationship than mentor/mentee one so I wont lose her and she wont feel like shes losing me.
Shes a crazyyyyy kid with so much energy and enthusiasm for life, laughing, and friendships. I’ll have more stories to tell than I’ll know what to do with!
Just some background info on my mentoring program if you’d like to understand it…
First of all, its called DREAM and its influenced me more than college has. DREAM stands for Directing through Recreation Education Adventures and Mentoring
We meet Fridays at 315 and work with kids from an affordable housing community in Milton VT. They all are amazing kids but come from a really rough place. They are all exposed to sex, drugs, violence every day and as a mentoring group we do our best to show them that there is more to life if they make the right decisions. We help them with anything personal/school related, let them try new things like rock climbing, ice skating, and even trips to NYC, and just try our best to be good role-models to them.
