What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
- 1. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
- 2. At the beginning of the year I used the school Mac's to a lot of my work including blogging and making my preliminary task. Seeing as I had never encountered a Mac before I struggled at the beginning because to me they were completely backwards, but as the project went on I became more familiar with them and how they work, even though I didn't use them to make my final project them came in handy for blogging and research. Now I am able to use Mac's fairly easily to do what I want where it would take me at least ten minutes to figure out how to get onto the internet now I can get straight there and do what I need to do which I am happy about.
- 3. I used my Compaq laptop at home to do extra blogging and I also used it to make my music magazines. I had owned this laptop for a year previous so I knew my way around it and I was used to the software it provided unlike the Mac's which I had to train myself on. Using this was convenient for me because it meant that I could work on my magazine at home rather than waiting to go to school to do it, being able to use my laptop made me more organized and allowed me to keep up to date with my work especially if I missed anything in the lesson.
- 4. I only used Pages once during this project and that was for my preliminary task. Overall I didn’t like using Pages because for me it was difficult to figure out because I was so used to using other pro-grammes At first when I started my preliminary task I had no idea what I was doing with this program but as I continued through the lesson to use it I began to figure it out a bit more until I could finally figure out what everything did, but in general Pages wasn’t my favourite piece of technology to use.
- 5. I used Google a lot during this project, mostly with research and my blog photo's. I had used Google a lot before this project so it was a pretty simple search engine to use, it allowed me to find what I needed with ease and I could access it anywhere I wanted as long as I had my laptop or phone so this was a handy website for my blog and work.
- 6. Blogger was one of the main piece of technology in my project because it was where I actually posted my work and research. However before this I had never used I took an hour or so just getting to know the website and how to get to certain places which was really helpful, once I had figured it out I found the rest pretty simple because it was fairly easy to get around which was really convenient Not only this but I didn’t have to be at school to access it which was good because then I could do work at home. Blogger allowed I and my classmates to comment and see each others work, this was helpful because we could get feedback on each others work which I think was helpful for all of us.
- 7. I used Picnik on my magazines from my mock up onwards for editing. I had some previous experience with this website so it was easy to work around, the website was closing down but luckily it wasn’t until after our work was finished which was good because it was a vital piece of editing for photo's. Seeing as it was closing down we were able to use premium edits for our photo's which made them look more professional.
- 8. This was the camera I used for my final pictures for my magazine, it was 16.5 megapixels so it allowed me to get good quality photo's, I had received it a couple of days before the photo shoot so I took a couple of days just getting used to it. This piece of technology allowed me to do many things such as adjust lighting, flash, zoom among others so I was able to get a good range of photo's for my magazine. Not only this but it came with a USB which meant when I got home I could simply upload the pictures to my laptop and begin working on my magazine rather than having to send them to school via email or memory stick.
- 9. To make my mock up onwards of my music magazine I used Photoshop CS5 which I had installed on my computer. This program gave more punch than Pages so I was able to do a lot more with my magazine because it was more flexible. I had used Photoshop previously so I didn’t have to take a while getting used to it like Pages, so it was easier and faster than using the Mac's. I think using Photoshop allowed me to get more out of this project because I was able to learn more about what I could do because I wasn’t as limited as I would be with Pages, so I could test more things out to see what worked and what didn’t
- 10. I used internet explorer for online things as it was simple and fast so I didn’t have to wait to search for things. I needed to use internet to get onto thing such as Picnik, Slideshare and Prezi so without this piece of technology I would not have half a blog so this to me was probably the most used piece of software.
- 11. Slideshare was used to transfer Powerpoint presentations into online presentations for my blog. I used this a number of times because it made blogging a lot more interesting and it was fairly easy to use. At first I found it difficult figuring out how to get the presentations onto my blog because I had to use the HTML code, but after I had done it once it was easier afterwords, this was a more interesting way for me to share my work via blogging.
- 12. Like Slideshare, Flickr allowed me to make my blog more interesting. I used Flickr to tag my final magazine pieces and seeing as I had never used it before like many other things during this project I had to work my way the website to figure out how to do everything. If I ever did anything like this again, I would definitely use Flickr because it allowed me to change my blog up a bit appearance wise.
- 13. Out of Prezi, Flickr and Slideshare I definitely found this one the most time consuming because there were so many parts to making the presentations. Apart from this I think it was definitely the most diverse software because it was so different to the other pro-grammes, overall it was a good website to use as it allowed me to be creative with what I made.
- 14. I hadn’t used this piece of technology until my evaluation nor had I ever heard of it so it was completely new to me, however it was different to anything I had used on my blog so I wanted to give it a try because I found writing chunks of paragraphs extremely boring to read.
- 15. I used Windows Live Movie Maker to make my character profile before uploading to YouTube. I had used this software maybe twice so I wasn’t completely confident in using it but still it allowed me to do what I wanted to create, and overall it was a good piece of software to use.
- 16. I used YouTube to upload my character profile video, using it was simple because I think almost everyone has used it at some point, uploading the video was fast so I didn’t have to wait around for ages then all I had to do was paste the HTML code into my blog and voila! YouTube wasn’t an essential piece of my blog but I think it allowed me to try different things out to see what worked well with my blog as a whole.