Technologies i used
- 2. From creating my music magazine I have learned new technologies and how to use them and with some of the technologies I was familiar with I built on my previous skills for example I already had an understanding of digital slr cameras however my understanding was minimal as in order to take successful pictures which would be suitable on the front cover contents page and the double page spread of my magazine I had to consider many different factors including the lighting. The internet based technologies were all new to me.
- 3. Blogger is a online blog publishing service. As you can see from the screenshot I have used it to post my A-Level Media Studies work on it. The good thing about Blogger is that it allows you to use lots of different technologies (which I will talk about in the next slides) and imbed them on your blog. On blogger I had to embed codes to get other technologies onto my blog for example when adding a Prezi I would have to copy the link into a new post.
- 4. This is the home page of my Slideshare account. Slideshare allows me to import PowerPoint presentations (in my case Microsoft PowerPoint presentations) onto my blog. This is useful as I believe it is a more effective and also more presentable way of posting my work. As I can produce a presentable piece of written work or picture based document instead of putting it straight onto my blog
- 5. Survey Monkey is an online software which allowed me to create a questionnaire to send to my peers. It was extremely easy to use and conveniently Survey Monkey has a help centre on the website if I had any trouble. Survey Monkey is very good as it allows you to create a variety of different questions e.g. a multiple choice or a question with a comment/essay box to write in. For the free version which I used it was 10 questions which was enough for what I wanted to ask my target group
- 6. Prezi is an online presentation software which I learned how to use to create my coursework in an extremely unique and clever way. It is very interactive and allows the user to go through it and read information in different ways instead of just reading a whole page and then another. It has many features so each “Prezi” you do can be totally different to the previous one you did. Below is one of the Prezi I had previously made. Prezi was used for some of my evaluation questions aswell as some of my other less written work
- 7. I have learned how to use Photoshop the graphics editing program. This is arguably the most important of the programs for me to learn as it was vital that I created a good Front cover and Contents page for my music magazine. Below I have placed a image of my front cover. Also on Photoshop I learned how to modify images for example this image of the artist on my front cover has been modified in a way to make it more bold and fit in better with the bold writing as apposed to the image straight of the camera. Also the background has been cut out.
- 8. These were used to take the pictures of my artists during my production work. Therefore they are part of the wide range of technologies which I learned to use. They was important to my work as my pictures had to be successful for my magazine to be successful. That is why when taking my pictures I had to consider many things. For example the camera shot… was it a low shot to emphasise the importance of the artist for example. Also the lighting was a key factor when taking the pictures. When taking the pictures I also had to consider iconography and whether it was obvious in the image (as it is in my main image with the artist with his hood up
- 9. Although I knew how to use YouTube I enhanced my skills In the way that I used it to teach myself different programs or even features on different programs with tutorials or help videos. This is what I did with Adobe InDesign, Prezi and Slideshare as I had no idea how to use them so I searched for videos when I got stuck or if I wanted to know how to do something.
- 10. Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing software. I used it to produce my double page spread. As mentioned on the slide before I used YouTube videos on numerous occasions when using Adobe InDesign as it was completely new to me and I had no understanding of it. It was very hard to use as I had problems making the double page spread look authentic but as mentioned earlier once finding tutorial videos on how to do things like add margins it became a lot simpler for me
- 11. In conclusion I believe I have used the technologies available to me in a very effective way as my work has been to good standard and in many different formats. My favourite of the technologies was Prezi as it was a new way of presenting work for me and I found it also a fun way to do my work. My least favourite was Adobe Indesign however once using tutorials I did become more familiar with it. Furthermore most of the technologies I have used I wasn’t familiar with before I started this course. Without these technologies I couldn’t have been successful as my work would have been both repetitive and boring.