Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Original PWS

PWS 1
I am a water bottle. I have been stuck on the side of the road for 8 months, going wherever the wind takes me. I’ve survived inclimate weather, oceans, and forests. All of a sudden, I am shoved into a dark bag.
“I must be being recycled” I said to myself.
Just as I came to this realization I was dumped into a gigantic bin with hundreds, if not thousands of other plastic bottles like me. We are all first sent through a sorter where all materials that are not plastic are taken away and so only plastic is left. I am then cut into little pieces to be prepped for melting. Thankfully, we are all sent through the wash, I am finally contaminate and dirt free. Once the cleaning is done, I am on my way to be melted down. During the melting process I am cleaned once again to make sure any extra dirt is completely gone. Instead of a water bottle, I am now separated into multiple pellets of plastic to be sent out across the country to create useful recycled products such as lumber for building houses, toys for children, and various household products.
The environment is our most important resource; by polluting we are destroying it. Land and water are home to thousands of species including humans. The plastic bag you see lying on the side of the road can take up to 500 years or more to decompose and most times are eaten by animals which eventually leads to their death. By being careless with our waste we are damaging habitats and killing the animals that live in them. Littering attracts bacteria and vermin, which are dangerous to humans and also makes the earth less attractive to look at. If something is not done to prevent the declining health of the environment one day we will not even be able to swim in open water or breath clean air. With the release of An Inconvenient Truth the problems with our environment suddenly became obvious to America and so the “Green Movement” was created. Going green is an effort to conserve and protect America’s environment.
The motto of “going green” is to “Recycle-Reduce-Reuse.” Going green seems intimidating when looking at it as a whole, but broken down it is very simple and by making small changes to your daily habits you can reduce the destruction of the environment greatly. Recycling is one of the easiest things you can do to help save the environment; it is also cheaper then dumping garbage at a landfill by $20 and $40 cheaper then incinerating garbage. Knowing how to properly dispose of garbage will help keep our environment healthy by using less energy and pollution to create new products. Creating new products uses an excessive amount of and releases greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, which are linked to air pollution and global warming. Some ways you can go green at home include turning the lights off when leaving the room, separating trash, using reusable water bottles, buy recycled and organic items, and buy fruits and vegetables from local farmers to support the economy. These small changes have a huge impact on the environment and it is important to keep the earth beautiful and healthy, but not doing so we run the risk of losing all that is natural and living to an uninhabitable planet.

PWS 2


PWS 3
The Future
by: mnorman91

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Post Due 11/1

Ideas for getting and maintaining a healthy amount of Facebook "likes":
  - use integrated plug-ins that connect the blog, Twitter, and Facebook
  - use tags that will connect your post to another page
  - promote the Facebook page on the Twitter page
  - add the Facebook url to the Twitter and Blogger
  - promote the page via a private Facebook account
  - only post posts that will contain good content
  - interact with those who've "liked" your page
  - ask fun, engaging questions
  - reminds your fans to "Like and Share"
  - join relevant groups
  - buy advertising
  - only allow users to view your page if they "Like" it - sks

Accumulating and Maintaining Twitter Followers:
Most information regarding this topic seems pretty obvious: make your account public, create an interesting bio, share valuable content, etc. But there are a few more relatively less thought of ways to either make or break your twitter presence.
- Post frequently, but don't flood your followers. A couple tweets a day featuring valuable, interesting information should suffice. No one wants their twitter feed bombarded.
- Reply to others publicly, and avoid using DM (direct messaging) at all costs. It is important to look sociable and involved.
- Practice strategic following. If your twitter addresses a specific cause or theme, it must run over into who you are following. Also, if you follow accounts with similar topics of interest, there's a greater chance you'll get a follow backs.
- Be generous with linking and retweeting others. Again, it is important to appear sociable and involved. Twitter is a social media site based around the concept of sharing. Retweeting someone else may result in them retweeting you, and so-on and so-forth. You want your followers to be aware of accounts you're interested in, and in turn they'll want their followers to be interested in you.
- Avoid too much promotion. This is somewhat along the lines of not bombarding your followers. Too much promotion can make you seem less credible and more like a spam account.
- Don't worry too much about numbers. Worry about quality and the numbers will take care of themselves. Racing to get the most followers makes you appear fake and inauthentic. Other users will wonder if you really care about your cause, or if you're just trying to accomplish some sort of internet fame. Slow and steady wins the race. -NB

People follow Twitter accounts to see what is happening right now and want to be able to get information fast. By making our Twitter bio explain exactly what type of company we are, followers can decide for themselves if we are a company they would be interested in following. As stated before no one likes to be hounded on the internet with Direct Messages or "Please follow us" so keeping that to a minimum is ideal. Posting fun and interesting pictures is also a good way to get followers and keep them. Simply stating facts can become repetitive and can cause us to lose followers. By keeping our tweets fun and interesting with videos, pictures, or even contests for our followers we can gain new ones and keep ones that are already following. Posting a tweet asking people to "Retweet" us can help gain followers also. This is a tricky step though, because we do not want to make this a habit since it will become annoying. By hash tagging certain points we can find other people who are interested in the same topics. -MN
Ideas for Team Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWMPNiEzAkw&feature=related
This is a video created by University of Washington students sharing facts about recycling and garbage, and giving examples of efficient and poor recycling, and their effects not the environment.

The videos below gives examples of different ways you can reduce your carbon footprint, and things you can do around the house to change the way you use energy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XBSoovQtY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlZoN_Ry8_Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjSIPNPIO_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_YuLgJFBek&feature=related

This video is not the best video or the best quality but it is a good idea. Instead of creating a fact forward video we can make it fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wzb0rreaGI
MN


As far as our team video goes, we could create a narrative with all of us as student and could show each of us throughout our daily routine, which would include various examples of how to go green and change small things in your daily life to help the environment. That way, we would direct the video at our intended audience, and use the video to encourage them to get more involved in their community's recycling efforts. If we do that, we could combine the situations presented in the first video with the examples given in the other videos of how to go green to create our narrative for our team video, or do something similar.
Taylor

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

First Day Results

Team Members

Topic: Recycling

Team Name: Footprint U

Shelby Schwab - Audience
Miranda Norman - Creative
Kira Farley - Coordination and Details
Natalie Bartlett - Editing and Writing
Taylor Dale - Tech

Contact Email: footprint303@gmail.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/FootprintU