A Little About Me

     Hi, my name is Anna! I'm a student with goals to be an English and Theatre teacher one day, and I love to write, read, watch movies, and collect records. I enjoy prose writing as well as sketch comedy, and I'm a member of a college comedy group. I also enjoy acting and theatre, both on the stage and on the screen. 

    I have used technology in an educational setting as a student many times. Much of my schoolwork in high school was done online, using sites like Google Classroom. I have also used Microsoft Office programs such as PowerPoint and Word for a very long time, even back to elementary school. I have not, however, had to use technology in a teaching setting very much, outside of the occasional presentation to a class. I'm excited to learn how I can utilize technology in order to prepare myself for a career in education. 

    I have interacted with many personal learning networks over the years, but one of my most recently helpful ones involves my stint in comedy. As previously stated, I'm a member of a college sketch comedy group. We produce all of our own material, from writing to directing to acting to costuming. I'm fairly new to the group and to comedy in general, so I have been working this year to improve my skills and open up new creative avenues that I haven't explored before. To do this, I often conduct research in the form of watching other sketch shows, like Saturday Night Live, Portlandia, and Key and Peele, as well as independent creators on YouTube and Tik Tok, such as Noel Miller, De'Marcus Shawn, and Becca Batsos. I am also a huge lover of sitcom-style comedy shows, notably 30 Rock and The Office. I often collaborate with other members of my cast to write sketches. We have weekly meetups before our larger cast meetings to bounce ideas off of each other and polish sketches we're working on in order to pitch them to the full cast. I also will talk to my friends who are not in the cast in order to get inspiration or ask them for recommendations about certain punchlines. Usually to write a sketch, I will use Google Docs. In the past, I have also used a script writing program called Celtx that helps to format and share documents. I also have an iPhone Note full of random ideas I get for jokes and sketches. Overall, I have used these sources in order to go beyond simply telling jokes and actually using the field for social commentary. It's a difficult thing to do at first, and I'm still navigating it, but by collaborating with my castmates and friends, as well as observing the pros of the industry, I'm able to generate ideas and create things that I'm truly proud of. 

"People at Theater" by Monica Silvestre is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0