Reading Louis Banks story Hard Times was a real eye opener for me. The story talks about how difficult it was for both white and black people to get jobs during The Great Depression. I have been told some stories over the years from relatives who lived through it, but Banks’ narrative helped me see the adversities in a whole new light. I especially liked the quote, “Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, ‘cause everybody was poor.” After the stock market crashed, everyone was. I did find it interesting though that even though all these men were hoboes looking for work, still race came into place and only the whites were hired. That had to be painfully hard to swallow for the black men because they too were going from place to place just to find work so they could make money for their families. I thought this part of the story was very sad. I thought it was so endearing when the men would call home to their mothers and tell them how good things were, when truth be told they were sleeping under steps.

            What I most admired about all these men, black or white, was their strength and resilience to make a bleak situation better. In my opinion, they were very courageous leaving their families to find work, earning meager amounts of money. I especially found it interesting that the man was glad to go into the Army. I thought it a peculiar way to look at things, but I could see his point of view. At least he had a roof over his head, had food to eat, and steady money coming in. I guess for him, even though the threat of death lurked at all times, was better than life on the streets pandering to make money. It ‘s almost like people homeless people who go and get themselves arrested because they too will have a roof over their head and three square meal to eat. Maybe it’s a survival instinct.

            This reading reminded me of the stories I have heard from my mom, aunt, and grandmother of their time when they lived through The Depression. I’ve heard how hard it was for people, how they had to ration things to survive, and how eventually when things got better, they stuck to that mentality for fear of it happening again. My grandfather today is still a frugal man, even though he has lots of money in the bank. He’s just never forgotten how tough it was back then, and wants to have money saved just in case it should happen again. I can’t imagine how my family would be affected should that happen to us in this generation. I guess we can learn a lesson from those who’ve gone before us and appreciate things a little bit more.

     Creating my Twitterive was a very good learning experience for me.  Along the way I took many technological steps to get to my finished product. I was curious and eager to see how this project would unfold. I had used Twitter before in a previous technology class, and I didn’t really see the point of constantly updating one’s status. I mean, who really cares? Hasn’t that already been explored on Facebook? However, I was open and excited to the challenge, and I embraced the opportunity once again to advance myself in the world of technology through tweets and twitpics. The last time I used Twitter for an assignment, I just went to the website every time on my computer. This time I downloaded the Twitter app on my Blackberry. We were mobile! Now through the app, my Twitter would always be with me so I could tweet my thoughts and upload my interesting pictures through Twitpic. Once I got the hang of Twitpic, there was no stopping me. I began to really enjoy the creative end of my Twitterive. Sometimes I felt silly; other times I felt inspired. I wasn’t sure how everything would turn out, but I just kept following Professor Mangini’s directions to tweet and upload pictures, and eventually the story would present itself. It was true, and I eventually saw it begin taking shape. It’s funny, just when I thought my Twiterive was going in one direction, it ended up going in a different one. I found tweeting easy and did it a lot. I knew the more pictures I took and the more tweets I shared, the more material I would have to work with for my final product presented on my Weebly website. I really learned a lot when creating my Twitterive. I learned that technology can be used in an interesting and positive way to promote writing. As we come to the end of our everyday usage of tweets and twitpics, I will continue to use Twitter even after the fact. Now I can/will use it creatively in the future instead of just saying what I’m doing.

My technology process continued as I used the Weebly website. I created a Twitterive page, a gallery of sorts, to showcase my work. The Weebly site was relatively easy to use when creating my own website. However, when using it though for my end product, there were some font issues and other minute problems that I had to overcome. Overall I found using Weebly to be very user friendly in the grand scheme of things. I don’t think it should be used for Blogs though. That’s what blog sites are for. There’s not much room to play around with Weebly on the downside. One has to remember it’s kind of a bare bones template for creating a website. It does get the job done, there’s just not too many bells and whistles that other sites can afford you. It did get the job done for my Twitterive assignment. I was very happy and satisfied with my Twitterive final outcome. What I learned during the process will carry over into my future life as a teacher. I can use this type of idea maybe later on in my classroom as a group project one day.