Evaluation Question 6

What have you leant about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This whole process has been brilliant in the way for me to learn about new ways of presenting my work and research using new technology.

http://my.brainshark.com/home.aspx
http://voicethread.com/


BLOGGER

This was so much easier to use than a book. I often find that if I have to catalogue my work in a book or folder, various pages tend to get lost or damaged, or due to extraneous factors like a faulty or unreliable printer, some would just be missing or seemingly unfinished. Just being able to display my work exactly as it was created also means that the quality is exactly as intended, meaning any marks lost won't be down to something being pixelated in the process of me fitting it onto an A4 sheet of paper.

Another bonus that I learned how to use was that I could completely reorganise my work by just re-typing the date, which is so much easier than tearing out pages and reordering them by hand, which requires not only reordering them, but looking through them and determining which bits are which. I could also put these works into subfolders, making them easier to find.

Not only all this, but I could go over my work, re-type here and there, tweaking fonts and formats how I wanted them, which would be a lot more time consuming by hand.


PHOTOSHOP

I already knew how to change colours etc. and use the magic brush tool on Photoshop after spending a week in a photography studio for work experience, however in that week, I hadn't learned how to airbrush, which I have done over the course of the project. This new skill came in very useful, as many of my images were unattractive to look at and were in need of a little bit of tidying up.

What I didn't know was that airbrushing is just making the images slightly out of focus, which was a lot simpler than I expected it to be. Not only did this help with removing creases and blemishes, but it allowed me to remove a lot of pixelation, which was one of my main problems during the editing process.


iMOVIE

This, again, was a lot simpler than I expected it to be. Although the effects it allows me to use wouldn't be quite as professional as they would be in Final Cut Express, this allows me to make short movies or slideshows with music or voiceovers in the background, which is definitely going to be useful in the future.

This also gives me a range of special effects and transitions to mess around with, which use a simple drag and drop design, which is incredibly easy to use and makes the videos more visually exciting than just plain videos or images.


THE OTHERS:

SURVEY MONKEY

This was an incredibly useful way of gathering information from people, as it gave a vast array of options that we could use to inquire about our target audience. It made surveying people a lot less time consuming, as it didn't need one of us to take down answers and keep an eye on how many questionnaires were distributed/collected, we just had to copy and paste a link on the internet and ask a few people to follow the link and answer the questions, and the answers given would be sent back to us, already counted and laid out for us, easy to read.

However, to have it all laid up in a presentable fashion (e.g. on a pie chart), or to have the non-option answers counted, we would've had to have bought the premium version. This would've been incredibly useful for displaying my results on the blog, however, it wasn't entirely necessary, so I did it the overall more time-consuming way of counting them myself.


PREZI (also SlideShare and HTML Embedding)
I was, at first, reluctant to use Prezi, as I felt it would be a lot easier to just make a slideshow on Powerpoint and upload that. This proved time-consuming, as it mean I had to make the slideshow, save it, upload it onto SlideShare (which is less straightforward than it sounds due to restrictions on the school computers) which takes a long time, and when that's done, embed it onto my blog. In fact, it's a lot easier to use Prezi, and in the end, it does look a lot more professional, and is easier to view/find specific areas.

In the process working with this, I learned how to use HTML to embed videos and suchlike onto my blog (usually on the 'share' menu, copy and paste to 'Edit HTML' on the blogs 'Edit Post' page), which is a lot more professional-looking than just posting a link.


XTRANORMAL
This was definitely my favourite medium for interviews and videos, as it meant I didn't need to go through the trouble of finding someone else to interview, as many of the people who I'd asked to help me in previous parts of the project had been camera-shy. It also meant there would be less room for hesitation and mistakes.

However due to the fact I need to buy a premium version to be able to record my own voice, i had to suffer the problems of automated voices - not only do they not quite have the same aural tone, like pitch changes in questions and pauses, but they have trouble reading out initials, like NME, FHM and IPC.

But besides those problems, it's quite entertaining, as I was able to mess around with camera angles, actions and what the characters sound and look like (but again, that was restricted because it wasn't the paid version), which made the video more interesting to watch and listen to.