When my teacher said we were starting Capstone, I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited! But I knew it would be a long journey. I thought it would take forever to do research, then an essay, then make a script template! And have the final product. But now that I’m done, I feel that it all went by quick. Soon I am going to be presenting my Capstone. The topic of social media and how it affects us.
One of the first parts of the capstone journey was after we chose our topic, we had to do a ton of research. And I mean a ton. We had about two weeks to gather everything and we had a lot of time each day. We took our notes on our Capstone notebook. When I started to research, I tried to organize my notes. I used colors for each sub question and I made it neat. I learned so many things about social media that I didn’t know! More research is always better than less, so to do more research, I spent time at home doing it. One night I spent about an hour. That hour was very useful and got me many pages of research. After that night, I felt I was almost ready to begin the next step. But I still had to do a bit more research. I’ll be honest, at one point it did get very tiring, doing so much research every day. But I got used to it and used my time wisely. A few days later, I was officially ready for the next step, I finished my research early, so I was ahead. The next step was to write an essay filled with all of my research.
The next step was to write an essay. This essay had to be long, but considering how much research I had, I knew it would be long. The essay was to answer your main inquiry question. Mine was “In what ways does social media affect us?” This is what I did my research on. Starting the essay was hard because most people didn’t know what to do for an introduction. My teacher gave us a lesson and showed ideas, so after that I felt better and knew what to do. The body paragraphs were easier because we had all of the research, and we just had to put it in. But it did take long. By the end of it, I had more than 5 pages for my essay! It was easy to put all of my research in the essay but making the wording sound mature and professional was hard to do and had a lot of work put into it. We had many examples of Capstone essays from the past so I got a sense of what to do. Overall the essay was hard, but I really enjoyed writing it. Now, the next step was to make my script. You can look at my essay here.
Picking between a TED Talk or Movie was difficult. I wanted to do a TED Talk because I wanted to present mine out loud and not in a video, but at the same time I thought I wouldn’t be able to memorize everything. And I wanted to do a Movie because I knew I wouldn’t mess up. But I decided to do a TED Talk. When I got my TED Talk script template it was easy because for the narrative, I just copied and pasted my essay in the narrative box. But the next part little did I know would be one of the hardest parts by far. The maximum time your TED Talk could be is 6 minutes. And when I timed my essay, It was more than ten minutes long. So the hardest part was definitely cutting my essay. I had so much good research, it was hard to know what to take out. It took me a long time to figure out how to make 5 pages of words turn into only one page. I thought it would be easy. But oh, was I wrong. But now that part has passed. And its time to really do the script. So after I cut out parts of my essay, I put it into my script template. The way the template was set up was with sections of the words we speak, the time we speak for, the number slide, and what picture we would put in the slide. This part was pretty easy. And after I finished that, it was time to really start getting ready for my presentation. If you want to check out my script look here.
The next part was to create my slideshow. I had to gather many images of different things.I will admit this part was easy. And after that I had to do one of the really hardest parts which was to memorize my whole script. When it came to this part I couldn’t believe I have come this far. But I knew I had to start memorizing. My teacher gave us different strategies to help with memorizing. I chose to print my script, and glue it on postcards. After that I started to memorize. But when I started to memorize, I already remembered my introduction and my first body paragraph. I was surprised, but also happy because it made me think that memorizing would be easy. So I kept memorizing and memorizing. I started to share my presentation to the class, to get feedback. And each time I went up I felt more comfortable every time. When I got to the end of memorizing, I was relieved. Because I will be honest, sometimes when memorizing it was a struggle and hard, so it made me annoyed when I would mess up. But when I finished memorizing,it did not mean I was done. Even though I knew what to say, I still had to know how to speak to the audience, speak clearly, and loud enough for people to hear. This part was easier. I would say memorizing was one of my favorite parts because I was doing hard work and at the end I was proud of it.
It feels like just a day ago I had my first Capstone lesson, but capstone is almost done! I’m proud of how far I’ve come and I’m happy to say this experience has been very fun. What topic would you do if you had Capstone? Would you do a TED Talk or a Movie? If you want to look at my Canva poster with more information about social media look here for my digital trifold. And here for a printable copy. Also, if you want to check out my video of my presentation, look here.