Question Six of the evaluation for my media project

1. {
What have you learned about
technologies from the process of
constructing this product?
Evaluation Question Six – Kate Garner

2. For this project, I had to set up a blog to
accompany my work on a website called
Blogger which I had never used before.
Throughout the process, I have learnt
how to make and design a blog, post on
it, organise my posts into different labels
(research & planning, production,
evaluation), add videos, embed
presentations, add pictures and
overcome issues with Blogger. For
example, Blogger does not perform well
with internet explorer which was a
problem I had to discover and overcome
through trial and error as well as
internet research, and found that it
performs much better using Firefox.
BLOGGER

3. One of the biggest lessons I had to learn
during this project was to work out how
to use Photoshop effectively. I had
minimal experience of using this
software before the project and it is very
complicated. A lot of what I had to do
came from trial and error or trying to
find tutorials on the internet.
Considering that there were deadlines
for this work, having minimal
knowledge of Photoshop was a huge
disadvantage as trying things, getting
them wrong and doing them again ate
into the time I had available. A positive
was that I accidently stumbled across
some techniques that I didn’t intend to
do but ended up liking. I learnt how to
do a lot of things, but probably the most
important one was editing the
hue/saturation levels on my photos or
using the healing brush tool on close
ups of my models.
PHOTOSHOP

4. I used Publisher to design and layout
my double page spread. This was
probably the technology that I was
most familiar with before the project. I
still learnt new things and encountered
difficulties using this however as I had
never designed an article before. I
learnt how to use the gridlines to fit my
text efficiently and successfully, as well
as the overflow bucket tool so I knew
how much text was missing out and
could easily fill columns with the
overflow text. One of the biggest
difficulties was trying to get all of my
text to fit along with pictures and also
trying to decide which bits of my text
needed to be cut in order to fit without
compromising anything important
from the interview.
PUBLISHER

5. Slideshare was something I had
never used before this project
but it helped me to meet the
brief and keep my blog lively
and varied in terms of
technology and the way I
presented things. It allowed me
to upload PowerPoint
presentations to my blog, which
was very useful. I had never
used the technology before so I
had to learn how to use it but
this wasn’t too hard. The most
difficult thing to learn on
Slideshare was how to embed, as
I had never done this before and
didn’t know where to look for
the embed code.
SLIDESHARE

6. Prezi is another piece of technology I
had never used before prior to this
project. It allowed me to create a
different form of Powerpoint online
that was animated in order to make my
blog diverse and standout. Learning to
use it was quite tricky at times but,
again, the most difficult part was
embedding it into my blog.
PREZI

7. Dafont was a website I used to download
fonts to use on my magazine. I had never
used it before and I learnt how to look for,
preview, download and use fonts. The
hardest part was figuring out how to
preview fonts and also how to download
them so that they could be used on
Photoshop and Publisher.
DAFONT

8. I used a Nikon DSLR camera to take
my pictures in a professional studio
with lighting. I had to learn how to
use the camera and set it up in
accordance with the lighting, which
was difficult. The hardest part of this
was trying to alter the lights in order
to get the best shots and learning
how to do different techniques with
the camera. I also used my phone to
film different videos for my blog and
learnt how to upload videos to
YouTube and embed them into my
blog.
CAMERAS

9. Overall, I feel that I have learnt a lot about technology and how to
use it efficiently and correctly during this project. Technology is
definitely useful when making a magazine, especially Photoshop,
in order to get the product to be the most successful and
professional looking as possible.
CONCLUSION