What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? During the whole process of constructing my product, researching and evaluating it I have used many different technologies including web 2.0 apps, computer programs and some other equipment, a few I had used before and some were very new to me.
Technologies I used during the research stage of my product I used flickr to annotate various magazine cover, contents pages and feature articles of music magazines that are currently on the market. This helped me to understand what I needed to include in my product. Advantages: This website allowed me to annotate directly and neatly and I was able to upload to my blog easily. Disadvantages: It didn’t allow a long detailed analysis due to a constriction of space.
I used survey monkey in order to put out a questionnaire to a wider audience to find out things I should include in my product and what people would and wouldn’t like. Advantages: I was able to reach a wider audience and the website also collect the results and put them in a bar chart read for me making it quick and easy to review results. Disadvantages: Making the questionnaire and posting it was quite time consuming.
I used flipsnack I display my collected survey results in a more interesting and decorative way, instead of just wring a blog post about them. Advantages: It made my results more interesting to read and personalised them due to the various covers and colour schemes you can choose. Disadvantages: I found it quite frustrating that you weren’t able to crop pictures on the site.
Technologies during the production stage of my product CAMERA: The camera I used whilst taking the photographs for my magazine was a ‘Canon EOS 1100D Digital SLR’ and was the only photographic equipment I used for this product.
Advantages: This camera allowed me to take higher quality photos at ease as I’m not so good at taking photographs. Disadvantages: Some of the setting and various controls on that camera can be confusing for a first time user.
Photoshop Photoshop was the most important program used within the production of my magazine as it opened me up to various different techniques and tools to add precision to my product. Some of my favourite tools were ‘curve’, ‘marquee tool’ and ‘rulers’. The curve tool allowed me to change the brightness and contrast of my photographs, the marquee tool allowed me to select and edit certain areas instead of the whole body of work and rulers helped a lot when creating my contents page and feature article as it allowed me to keep the writing uniform. I learnt a lot when using Photoshop as I didn’t have any idea to use it before I began studying media and was even able to begin helping my peers use the program. Advantages: Allows edit and create a body of work precisely and made my product look professionally done. Disadvantages: Is very difficult to use at first and takes some getting used to.
Technologies I used whilst evaluation stage my product
I used prezi to make dynamic presentations to display a some of my evaluation work. Advantages: Provides themes as a template, you’re able to save your prezi and go back to it and also it makes whatever you’re trying to present more interesting to read. Disadvantages: Can be difficult to get your head around if you’re used to using simple programs like powerpoint to create presentations.
I used slideshare as it enabled me to upload powerpoint presentations online, allowing me to add it to my blog, although I only used it once it did come in handy. Advantages: quick, easy and very simple to use and very effective. Disadvantages: I haven’t found any difficulties for this site as of yet.
I used issuu to upload word documents of my evaluation so that they can be put onto my blog in a more professional way than a blog post. Advantages: Straight forward and upload is fast, no problem to put onto blog. Disadvantages: Sometimes when a document is uploaded it becomes a little distorted so it may have to be re-uploaded.
Blogger was undoubtedly the most importnt webspace used throughout this whole process as it was the place that held my complete body of work from start to finish from research to finished products. It also allowed me to access work already on my blog from home which was a big advantage, using blogger could also be considered as eco-friendly as not a lot of paper is being used as it is all online. However a disadvantage of storing all of my work online is that sometimes the internet can be unreliable in many ways, so for example if the internet was down at college it would be diffcult for me to access my blog or perhaps in the blogger site itself was down or under construction I could have delayed the uploading of completed work.
Conclusion In conclusion I learnt many different things using all of these different technologies such as the various ways to present a simple document like word or powerpoint and especially how to use photoshop tools properly to create the vision you want. I think that using these programs and web spaces have been a postive experience in media and also beneficial. I already had a blog before using blogger for coursework purposes and it hasn’t put me off continuing to use it, and I will definitely use websites like prezi and issuu in the future for college work as I found the both very useful and different.