Steps to be happy

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learning outcomes

  • Figure out the reasons caused unnecessary anxiety.
  • Learn basic methods for reducing pressure.
  • Learn some methods to keep you in a good mood.
  • Understand the importance of being accompanied by friends.

Main objects

In this post, we create an edited video to introduce you some useful methods that help you stay happy. Also, we will provide you with a brochure and pictures to understand the contents.

Steps to be happy

  • Firstly, you could spend less time imaging the difficulties and problems you might meet in the future. It is important to find ways to overcome the problems in your life, However, overthinking about the difficulties that do not take place is more likely to cause negative emotions, even anxiety. That is to say, instead of worrying about what your future might be, you will spend more time enjoying your life right now.
  • Secondly, try not to compare your life with others. With the development of social media, such as Instagram and TikTok, you can easily check out your peers and celebrities’ lives. Chances are that you would compare your life with theirs and complain about the problems you encountered. However, the majority of us are willing to share the happy things that happened in our lives without mentioning the difficulties we met. Thus, it is meaningless to compare with them.
  • Thirdly, keep in mind that setbacks and difficulties are not terrible. In fact, the most horrible thing is losing the courage to overcome them. After all, life is cruel. For the mediocre, frustration could only have a negative influence on them. They are likely to complain about the difficulties instead of overcoming them. However, for wise people, frustration is a significant part of life. They prefer to enjoy the joy and sadness of life.
  • Last but not least, you can find a way to relax. For instance, proper exercise is conducive to relaxing the muscles of the whole body and increasing the secretion of pleasant substances (dopamine) in the body, so as to relieve tension and anxiety. Also, enjoying a great movie and listening to your favorite music are also an effective way to relax. You could choose your own way to relax.
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How to be happier is, I think, a lifelong proposition for everyone. Some people may think that earning more money will make them happier. Some people may think that sports will make them happier. Of course, some people think that eating good food can make life better and happier, but in my opinion, happiness is to enjoy life with the people you love.

I don’t know if you’ve heard the story of a boy who had two apples, and he gave one of them to his best friend, so that they both had double happiness. Sharing is the basis of happiness, so I prefer to have dinner or drink with my friends or boyfriend. When happiness becomes a flowing atmosphere lingering in the air, the emotions of people around will also be unconsciously infected. Happiness, of course, can also be a continuous acquisition of new knowledge. Although learning is a hard process, the sense of achievement it brings is also worth it. Take myself as an example. In the first two years, I was very afraid of learning. When I met a difficult problem, I thought about how to escape instead of how to solve it. But right now, I prefer to take the bull by the horns,While I still think solving problems is never easy, the rewards of hard work make me happier.

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Reducing comparisons is also a big secret to staying happy. Nowadays, the pressure of social competition is becoming more and more intense. In my country, children not only need to finish their homework in school but also need to finish all kinds of after-school tutoring. Although the proper comparison is an essential part of self-progress, the proper adjustment will also reduce their pressure, to obtain more relaxed and happier. I think it is the right value of life to keep a balance of mind, to satisfy oneself properly and not to aim too high. From my personal point of view, physical happiness is always a low level of happiness, people should have a greater pursuit and ideal in the spirit. If there is no pain, then how do we perceive pleasure? I have always counted overcoming difficulties as one of my spiritual pleasures. I absolutely do not believe that success can be achieved without hard work, just like the Buddhist concept of karma

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Take me as an example: I was studying in an international high school in Shanghai. For studying abroad, the only way was to pass the language test. At that time, my English was very poor, and I didn’t want to learn English. At first I was only motivated by my parents’ expectations and pressure, which made me completely passive; when I forced myself to study, I found that my grades began to get better, and I got praise from others. I gradually began to love learning foreign languages. Besides, I’m a complete behaviourist. I don’t believe in the myth of learning. It takes hard work to improve, though I don’t deny that there are better ways to learn by rote. After half a year’s hard work, my Duolingo score reached 135/160. I felt very proud that solve the difficulties by myself. Physically, I was tired, but mentally, I grew to like it. I need a sense of accomplishment when I’m stronger by myself. It’s the happiest thing in the world.

Blog made by:

loreforever19

XuChang

Tengfei

ruoxiguo0221

Thank you for watching!!!!!!!!

Comment on Shining’s post

Hello Shining,

I love reading your post this week. I think you did a good job in describing The things you learned in this course. Also, I think it is noticeable that your multimedia skills has improved a lot. Furthermore, I think you did a great job in editing your movie and describing the work you have done. The background sound you chose is also reflects your feelings very well. The only suggestion I have about your edited video is that you could consider add some transitions between each video clips. Overall, I think your edited video is very good and I would appreciate to read your new posts in the future.

Sincerely,

Ruoxi

Bad experience about editing videos

From my own experience, one of the most effective ways to show my claims of presentation is showing the audience videos about the content. According to the segmenting principle, the voice of the videos could also positively affect the multimedia presentation. However, since I have no background knowledge about editing video, I was not good at editing the videos at all and have some bad experience of editing videos. The worst video-editing experience was about a video introducing a traditional Chinese food cured meat.

  • Firstly, the transition of the video was not good. It is important to add a transition between two video clips to make the entire video look fluent. However, since I did not know the importance of transition, I did not add any transitions in my video and the content of the video confused some audiences.
  • Also, I did not pay attention to the audio of the edited video. At that time, I did not check whether the volume of the video clips was appropriate. As a result, the volume of a video clip is too low and the audience could not hear that clip clearly.
  • Last but not least, I did notice that the color of the subtitles were quite similar to the background. So, it was not easy for the audiences to read the subtitles which affected my presentation result.

Improve the brochure introduced the pros of Face-to-face class and online class

For the brochure designed to introduce the advantages of two modes of the course: face-to-face course and online course, there are several changes I made.

  • First, I changed the pronoun of several sentences due to the personalization principle. For instance, in the first sentence of the online part, I change the original sentence “since students can join the class from different areas, they can save commuting time and spend the saved time in researching”, into “since we can join the class from different areas, we can save commuting time and spend the saved time in our researching”. Compared to the previous sentence, the new sentence can make the readers more relateble to the content. Thus, the readers are more likely to agree with the new content.
  • Secondly, according to the signaling principle, I add four words in front of the first sentence of each paragraph whcih represent the main point of each paragraph. For the first paragraph of online part, I add a word “time-saving”, which is the main idea I explained in the first paragraph. Similarly, I add “flexible time” ahead of second paragraph of the online part, “Focus” ahead of the first paragraph of Face-to-face part, “communication” ahead of the second paragraph of the Face-to-face part. After this, the reader can roughly understand the main point of each paragraph by looking at the first word which has positive effect on their understanding.
  • Thirdly, I delete illustrations at the top and bottom of the Face-to-face part, the two illustrations under the title of the brochure and illustrations on the top and bottom of the online part because of the coherence principle. After this, the new brochure appears more clear and makes my content stands out. Compared to the previous brochure, the readers are unlikely to be distracted by the illustration of the new brochure now.
  • Last but not least, I add a picture showing the zoom class. Due to the redundancy principle, by showing a specific scene of online learning, I think I do not need to explain what online learning is. Similarly, I add a picture showing the traditional Face-to-face class. Compared to the previous brochure, I think these photos illustrates the difference of these two learning modes better.
original brochure
Updated https://unsplash.com/photos/YRMWVcdyhml https://unsplash.com/photos/qnWPjzewewA

Comment on Shining’s post

Hello Shining,

I love reading your post this week. I think we both learned a lot about how to design our blog and future presentation. Also, I think you did a great job in creating posters using Canva. I like the poster you present in last week’s meeting because you did an amazing job in the layout and content. I am looking forward to see your future works. Besides, I also see huge improvement in your blogs. I think in your previous posts you were good at state your opinion clearly. But, in your recent posts, you also use more visual aids to prove your statement. I am looking forward to see your post next week.

Sincerely,

Ruoxi

New thoughts about my future design

After understanding the principles of Universal Instructional Design and Universal Design for Learning, I realized some shortcomings of my previous designs and found ways to improve my future design.

First and foremost, the principle that impressed me most is that I should offer more than one specific way to show my content. In my previous design experience, I mainly considered my professor as the audience. As a result, I only provide the experiment result and useful conclusion in my presentation and reports. However, in the future, I would also think about my classmates and other people that might be interested in my research. Therefore, I should also include more background introduction to my future project. Also, I would provide some useful short videos in case people are bored with massive data and formulas. What is more, it is also important to include some graphs which can illustrate my result clearly.

Besides, I should also offer people more choices to participate in my project. Previously, the only way they could participate in my project was that I would ask whether they had questions and they could express their problems by asking some questions face-to-face. I think in the future, I might include some ways that people could participate online. For instance, in the future, I would also post my content on the blog so that other researchers could view my project.

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Comment for Shining’s post

I really enjoy reading your post. I totally agree with your point that creation has a great impact on learning. Besides, it is also my first time using Canva, and I think Canva is definitely a useful tool for our future presentation. The poster you made also impresses me a lot. I think the picture you used as the background of your poster is amazing. My only suggestion is that you could change the colour of your words to make them clearer. Overall, I think your post is wonderful and I am looking forward to reading your new post next week.

Sincerely,

Ruoxi

My worst presentation experience

The worst presentation I have ever given was in last semester. It was a Maths final project presentation about the population model of the whooping cranes. There are three main reasons that the causes the bad presentation.

First of all, when I was introducing the whooping crane, I chose a scientific video to explain the content. Although the video I chose includes the main details should be mentioned about the cranes, the video is very time-consuming and relatively boring. Some of my classmates did not pay attention to the video and missed important background knowledge of my project.

Secondly, the layout of my PowerPoint is also very massy. Since I did not have enough time to prepare the PowerPoint before the presentation, I includes nearly all of the tables and plots in the draft. As a result, several important plots that shows the tendency of the population and the explaining words are not on the same slide. Since I compared three population models in total, there are dozens of plots and tables provided. As a result, lots of my classmates were confused about the difference between the models due to the massive tables and charts.

Last but not least, the timing was one of the reasons caused the failure. As I mentioned before, the video is very time-consuming. The representation was required to be finished within 15 minutes. However, the video I chose is an 6-minutes video, which took nearly half of the presentation time. As a result, I did not have enough time to describe the details of some contents which also caused confusion to the audiences.


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Comment for Shining’s post

Hello Shining,

I love reading your post about the reading principles. What I loved most about your post is the difficulties you shared about your own learning experience because I have also encountered the same problem. When I was in my first year of university, I was under lots of pressure before every exam because I was not sure about how to prepare for them. When I was in Chinese high school, the questions in the exams were quite similar to the assignments. It took nearly a whole year to find a better learning method. I think the video you attached is also very clear and succinct. It shows the main ideas you want to express.

Sincerely,

Ruoxi Guo

New thoughts about my learning experience

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When I look back on my learning experience after knowing the basic knowledge of the learning paradigms, I realize that two main paradigms were applied.

When I was in my first and second years in primary school, cognitive paradigms were applied by the majority of my teachers. When the teachers, especially math teachers, tried to introduce the new contents, they would simply state the definitions and explain them with plain words. Although the teachers tried some in-class games to make the learning process more interesting, I was not extremely fascinated about learning at school at that time. Math was my least favorite subject at that time because I thought math was about remembering numerous formulas and repeating complicated calculations.

However, nearly all my third-year primary school teachers preferred the constructivist paradigm. Taking my math teacher as an example, she would let us preview the knowledge the day before the class, and then assign an exercise to us at the beginning of the class. Then, she would give three students opportunities to write their own procedures on the blackboard and explain their own thoughts in front of the class. After that, she would let us spend about ten minutes representing and discussing the question. And at the end of the class, she would conclude our methods. Her different teaching method changed my attitude towards math because I loved presenting my own ideas about math questions to my classmates.

References

AITSL. [AITSL]. (2016, April 20). Engaging a Maths class [Video]. YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=csR-Py99PZ4

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