Natalie Nicoll's XP activity log

These are the screen shots of the presentation I made as an evaluation of my thoughts about how the project went.

These are some pieces of feedback from the client (Jenny Grahame) and people that have purchased copies of the newspaper…

JENNY GRAHAME

“MediaMe looks great. Works really well with the colour, etc. Mega achievement.”

MARY BERRISFORD (Islington - school)

“We’ve just put the underground map on the wall and are fighting about who is on the coolest line (that’s teachers not students by the way!) Initial reaction is that we can’t wait to use it in the classroom - could be a few more bigger images in there… We’ll use it with students next week (weds) and email you some more feedback”

REIGATE COLLEGE

• Good on section 1
• Methodical systematic and detailed
• Very concise to the point
• Very clearly expressed
• Wordsearch page blurry
• Wikipedia game Already played by lots of class good  -article- less obviously useful than others
• Useful - better than a textbook
• Great format
• Tube map great
• Format handy
• Teacher prefers online to print -students like print far more
• Layout really good
• Is point about TV not needing a licence true?

I think that also of this feedback is very good, it is very positive feedback and I am very pleased with the fact that people think it will be useful to students and that we have achieved what we set out to do at the beginning of the project.

As we had to generate advertisment in order to have the newspaper printed, we used companies to pay us for to put an advertisment for them into the newspaper…

With all of the advertisment our total income was:

• Advert for the Junction £350
• Advert for Lincoln University £100
• Advert for OCR £100

Total: £550

To print 500 copies of the newspaper in colour, it cost £500 including VAT, the postage for the first three orders £11.40. This meant that even before selling any copies of the newspaper we had already made £38.60 profit, from the money left over from the advertisers.

Selling copies:

We have managed to get a lot of different schools to purchase copies of our newspaper, which means even more of a profit.

• Reigate brought 120 copies (£60)
• Islington brought 40 copies (£20)
• Netherhall brought 30 copies (15)
• Guernsey Grammar brought 20 copies (£10)

This is a total profit of £105, from selling 210 copies.

As we had 500 copies of the newspaper printed and have only sold 210 and given several copies to group members and used as samples, we still have 240 copies of the newspaper that can still be sold. In order to sell these last copies the newspaper is being advertised by or client Jenny Grahame and on the OCR teachers website.

I think that this has been a success as we had made a profit before even having sold any copies, and people are still interested in buying copies, ‘Guernsey Grammar school’ only ordered their copies today, so the is still a lot of time for others to buy copies. Hopefully we will sell the rest of the copies, and recieve even more profit than the successful £143.60 profit that we have made so far.

These are the images of the final newspaper…not everyone’s article were eventually featured, although mine was and also the wordsearch I made with James in featured aswell.

I am pleased with how the final newspaper turned out, as it has a lot of useful information and contains quite a bit of colour and images which is what we planned to do. I am also very happy that both of my contributions to the newspaper were used in the final piece.

Mike has given me feedback on what is missing from my blog, and the things I need to put on there.

In response to this feedback; since he posted this I have already added my evaluation task to my blog, now I will add Kirk’s videos to my blog.

I think Mike’s feedback is very useful as it is a reminder of things that the group may have missed or forgotten to add to their blogs.

• How well does it meet your original intensions?

I think that the finished newspaper meets a lot of the original intensions that we had had for the it, a lot of the content ideas that the class created during the planning process was featured in the final product. Our original intensions were to create a newspaper that contains a lot of content related to the exam question and that it would feature a variation of; writing, puzzles/games and pictures. The final newspaper meets all of these criteria and it also meet our intension to make it colourful and appealing for teenagers of our age group that are doing OCR media studies. We successfully made this attraction and colourful which will help attract the attention of teenagers.

• How does it look?

The newspaper’s main appealing design feature is the use of colour and images, the colour also helps add variation to articles, such as mine, that does not feature any images. The front page is very interesting and appealing as it features a lot of colour and different sections of box-outs and an article. The logo on the front is also good. Each article, although mainly text is separated with images or large quotations and the main information such as; title, strapline and paragraph headings are highlighted using colour, this makes the information standout. Although all of the article look quite similar, it looks professional having all of the text in the same font and using the same font sizes of for certain sections, this make it look as though it is all made together, rather than made in small teams then collaborated together. There are also variations in the look of the newspaper due to the use of images for advertisement which also make the newspaper look very professional.

• How pleased are you with your contributions and how effectively did you work within your role?

I am very pleased with my contributions as I created two pieces of content that were used in the final newspaper, my article about Twitter and a wordsearch that  made with James. I am pleased because they are very different types of content and the wordsearch is the only game/puzzle in the newspaper which will hopefully help students that do not like just reading articles as revision. I think I work very effectively in my role as my role was to create content for the newspaper, which is what I did and I managed to finish all of my work to all of my deadlines. I think I also work well in my group as I communicated very well with my team, I worked well under the leadership of my team leader Philippa and work well on tasks in a team with James, we communicated well which helped us in getting our work completed. Although within our group we did have a few tense days where we didn’t all quite agree on something but whenever this happened we managed to be professional about the situation and when I was unhappy with a situation or a task I talked to Philippa in order to work it out.

• What could be learnt from the experience?

This was a great experience as it taught me a lot about working within ‘print media’ a form of media that I have not had any experience in before and although I do plan to continue in the print media industry it was a very useful project, not only because of learning about something new but also helping develop teamwork skills and working in a professional situation. We worked with teams, under leadership which meant I learnt what it is like to given tasks to do by your ‘boss’ and also because of the professional type situation; advertisers, clients, a brief, deadlines – it gave me a better insight into how it will be to work in the professional media industry in the future. This project has also taught me a lot about the importance of communication within a team, because when our team didn’t communicate with each other we did not have a clear idea of what we were all meant to be doing and when.

• What has been learnt from previous experience?

Before starting this project we had experience what is like to work within teams/groups that do not communicate or work together effectively. In other project such as ‘Show’ we were working within groups and when people didn’t stick to their individual roles and tried to take over other peoples jobs the work does get done as best it could and it showed that having leadership roles is a vital part of the media industry as it keeps everyone on track with what needs to be done and helps keep to deadlines.

This is my final article text……

Twitter – Changed Communication?

Blogging is a large part of online social networking but in recent years mircoblogging has formed and become extremely popular. The difference between microblogging and regular blogging is that microblogs consist of much smaller entries. The most popular microblogging site at the moment is a site called ‘Twitter’. Jack Dorsey, an American software architect, created twitter in 2006. Twitter allows its users to post updates up to 140 characters long, known on Twitter as ‘tweets’. Users can ‘follow’ anyone else on twitter, although some users set their profiles to private – which means in order to ‘follow’ them they have to give you permission, by following other users, their ‘tweets’ will appear on your homepage. ‘Tweets’ can also be linked to other users by ‘tweeting’ with - @username to send it to someone or #tag which enables people to search that and find what you’ve ‘tweeted’. Users can also send Direct Messages to one another, which are private. Pictures can also be posted in a ‘tweet’ by using one of the many twitter picture sites such as ‘twitpic’. Twitter is one of the only main social networking sites that uses separate websites to upload pictures, many social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have a feature on the actual site that allows users to upload pictures. Although most users to let everyone see what you are doing use Twitter, there are regulations, one being that users can set their profile and tweets to private, and only friends that the user accepts can see their tweets. Their has also been a lot of speculation on where Twitter should include an age restriction which would mean that, like many other social networking sites, users would be ask their birth date when signing up to check that they are 13 years old. Although many people feel that this is not enough restrictions, as anyone can lie about their age if all it takes is changing the year you were born in.

Twitter is currently ranked at the 12th most popular websites worldwide by ‘Alexa’s Web Traffic Analysis’, some of the sites that are ahead of Twitter in the rankings are; Google, Facebook, Youtube and Blogger. Unlike a lot of other social networking sites, Jeremiah Owyand, an analysist studying social media, has said that the demographic of twitter is mostly from older adults. ‘comScore’ have said that only 11% of the people using Twitter are  between the ages of 12 and 17. Twitter was relatively unheard of until around the beginning of 2009, when celebrities and well-known people joined the site, this resulted in a 1000% increase of users within 2009 alone.

Twitter, along with many other social networking sites, has changed the way many people communicate with others. The main way that networks, such as Twitter, are changing the ways of communication is by making it not only accessible online but offering a service in which users can link their mobile phone devices with Twitter, in the UK users on the mobile phone networks; Vodafone, O2 and Orange can send text messages from their phone, directly to twitter. The text message is then added as a ‘tweet’. Users that use this text service can also select specific users that they are following and have any ‘tweets’ they composed sent to their phone. This makes communication with other users easier as you do not need access to the Internet to ‘tweet’. Twitter can also be used on mobile phones that either have internet access or phones that provide application such as the ‘iPhone’ and ‘Blackberry’ can download many of the Twitter applications that are offered for such phones. This way of communication is a large change from previous ways of communication, before the use of social networking became popular, people’s only way of communicating was either face-to-face or talking on the phone.

People may also prefer to use Twitter as a way of communication because they can openly post messages about how they are feeling and their thoughts. Social networking offers people access to say the things that they would not usually be able to say to other people in person. Twitter is not only used as a way of friends communicating with one another, but within the past year Twitter has become a site which celebrities use to voice their opinions and update their fans about things. Celebrities can also use their large fan-bases on Twitter as a way of publicity, actor Ashton Kutcher says: ‘Half the budget of a film is spent on marketing and basically trying to reach the potential audience of that movie. I can do it for free by pushing a button.’

Although many people may view Twitter as a site filled with people writing pointless things that no one really cares about, it is being used as a valuable source of communication in many areas of work; education and business being the main areas. Many educational establishments are using Twitter as a way for students to communicate with each other and express their views in class discussions and also establishments such as The University of Vienna, Austria, use Twitter as ‘a useful tool for evaluating a course formatively. Because of Twitter’s simple use and the electronic handling of data, the administrative effort remains small.’ Businesses are now using Twitter, whether large or small, for publicity and to survey opinions and feedback, this is because any one ‘tweet’ can simply be viewed by millions of users within a few minutes. Twitter is also known to be used in; campaigns, politics and within the last year; space mission news. In May of 2009, Mike Massimino, an astromaut from NASA, used Twitter to send updates to people on Earth while in space on a mission to repair the ‘Hubble Space Telescope’. For all of these uses Twitter attracts a global audience. Twitter features a ‘Trending Topics’ list, which is a list of the top mentions things in ‘tweets’, and recently Twitter updated this service so that uses can change the ‘Trending Topics’ list to countries or cities they are from or interested in, this not only helps users see other countries most talked about issues and people, but adds an element of collective identity as people can be kept up-to-date with topics of conversation in the area of the world they are from.

What does the future hold for Twitter? New services and features will develop, according to reports, Twitter is developing a service, Twitpay, and a payment system similar to Paypal. Will social networking replace search engines? ‘Friends on social media are increasingly becoming people’s trusted source of information, even more than search engines’ says Soren Gordhamer on mashable.com. Although nobody knows what the future holds for social networking sites such as Twitter, it is for sure that the sites will continue to develop and change the ways people communicate. New services and features will develop until communication eventually moves away from social networking onto something differently entirely.

I was not in todays lesson, but Philippa helped me out by adding pink boarders to my article to add some colour, but although I was not there I was not able to add any images to my article.

Although my article now will not have any images, I am quite glad because had I put images into it, I would have had to cut away even more of my article than I already had, and I don’t think it will make to much difference to the effect the article has on the audience. Though some of the audience may not like a lot of text with no images.

We now have a final template, and today we each worked individually to put our article into this template. It had sections which needed to be specific sizes and fonts in which the document we were all sent had instructions.

At the end of my article is a picture of my opie, having this image at the end adds a personal feel to being the author, as not only does it end with my name but with a cartoon image of myself.

As this template meant that everything had to be a specific size font, I have to cut a few bit out in order to fit it onto one page…I will need to cut down even more in order to add any images.

In order for everyone to get there articles to fit into the template, I helped by giving Philippa and James each some feedback on what I think they could cut down or re-word to help shorten it to the length it needed to be. I hope that this will help them to complete their templated articles.

I also included feedback about spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and things that they needed to change according to Mike’s plan of text.

So that all of our article look similar, Mike gave everyone a copy of this piece of paper, telling us how we should write things, for example; number should be written in words and names of films/games/etc should be in italics.