Project: ZIP

Description: For 8 days, our teacher challenged us with choosing a topic, researching it using reliable sources, presenting it in a creative and informative way, and then citing our sources. For my topic, I chose to research how to freestyle rap. Once I finished researching, I decided to try my hand at it. Below are two raps. One is pre-written and is just to communicate what I learned, and one is an actual freestyle rap by me.

ZIP artifacts:

Criteria met:

Creativity, Innovation, Technology Operations and Concepts: 

5: I enhance the impact of my research or presentation through creative use of technology: 

I thought that because my project is adaptable in how it can be presented, and there’s a variety of ways to make it engaging to the audience while still having creative liberty to change things up, I thought if I pre-recorded myself so there would a lot less stress on me personally while still showing that I can freestyle rap after only 8 days of learning and practice. When the time came to actually present, I did a combination of talking to them about what I learned, and showing them through my recorded rap sessions, and then took questions at the end. 

6: I determine and use the most effective medium to present my work: 

Because this project was almost completely autonomous as a way to test our self-motivation as well as our researching and presenting skills, there was no preset way that each topic had to be performed. I chose to shake up how I would normally go about presenting, and pre-recorded a portion of my presentation so I wouldn’t have to worry about messing up, so I would actually have something to hand in to the teacher, and so my presentation wouldn’t just seem like me lecturing my classmate for 8 minutes repeatedly. The medium I chose worked effectively, because I also didn’t have to worry about being too loud as I could either lend them earbuds or get them to plug in with their own. 

Research and Information Literacy: 

9: I critically assess research sources for Currency, Reliability, Authority, and Purpose: 

Part of this project was assessing our ability to research a topic; we were expected to go through and “CRAP test” each source to make sure it could be trusted and to make sure it was still relevant today. I chose to do freestyle rapping, and because of that I didn’t have to worry so much about when my sources were from because although freestyling is evolving and people are learning more about it as time passes, it’s also quite personal and old tips from longer ago still apply to this day, especially when talking about basic components that don’t change over time, like rhyme schemes or how long a beat is. 

Digital Citizenship: 

13: I attribute credit to ideas that are not my own by preparing a Bibliography/Works Cited and my using in-text citations. 

At the end of this project, as mentioned in the description, we were required to prepare a Bibliography that would clearly show all the sources we used to research our topic, and as well they were in MLA/APA format for clarity. The Bibliographies we prepared actually had to be annotated, and what that means is that we had to cite our source in one of the accepted formats, and then write an approximately 100 word explanation of what the source is, what we used it for, and what it taught us. We ended up needing to do an annotated bibliography for 5 and cite the other 5 we had to have. If we used extra, we just added them in underneath.