WHAT HAVE YOU LEANT ABOUT TECHNOLOGIES FROM THE PROCESS OF

CONSTRUCTING ?

CAMERAS

When taking my pictures I used a combination of two cameras to take all my pictures used in my magazine.

For my front cover I used my iPhone 4s camera to take this picture this was simply because it was the best quality camera I had at the time. It was very easy to use the camera because I’ve been using it for a long while now so I'm very comfortable with using it. I didn’t change the settings in anyway because I was using natural lighting and didn’t see the need to change anything within the camera.

For the other pictures used in my magazine I used the SLR camera from my sixth form. I’ve never used the camera before so I decided to play around with it and get a feel of how it works. I played around with the setting until I got my desired effect. I used natural lighting for some of my pictures like the long shot pictures used in the double page spread. It was really trial and error until I got what I was looking for.

PRODUCTION PROCESSThroughout my production I used the website www.pixlr.com to edit my pictures and always used Microsoft Office to make small adjustments like grouping, cropping etc.

This was my first time using this website and I leant new things about it as I went along. I simply got one of the pictures I was thinking about using, uploaded it to the editor and learnt how to use all the tools on the website by experimenting. I loved using the website because I was able to do a wide range of things on there and it was very easy for me to use. I’ve leant so much on how to edit pictures and now I am completely comfortable with how to edit pictures and how to get the desired effect I'm looking for. Going though this process has also allowed me to see how important editing is and the difference it makes on a picture and how the audience view a picture.

APPLICATIONSI’ve used such a wide range of applications to showcase my research, planning, drafting, final products and evaluation.

I would say about 90% of the applications I’ve used I have never used before or even heard of. For example, I’ve never used Powtoon before or even heard of it, so when I used it for an evaluation question I found it very difficult at first. When using new applications I prefer to teach myself as I go along, rather than watching tutorials or following steps, so that’s precisely what I did. Powtoon is not like anything I’ve used before but reminded me a bit of a mixer of Prezi and Microsoft office PowerPoint so I used that to help me work out how to use it. After I got the hang of it I loved it because there’s so many things you can do on it and its like a short movie. I will differently use Powtoon again to do a presentation, though it was very time consuming I think the finish product is worth the time you spent making it.

I also used slideshare, YouTube, Prezi and PowerPoint to answer my evaluation questions. I’ve used YouTube, Prezi and PowerPoint before so using it once again was easy. Although I’ve never used slideshare before it was very easy to use and I didn’t come across any difficulties.

For my research, planning, drafting and final products I used applications I’ve used before such as Microsoft Office and prezi so I was comfortable when using it.

Using wikispace to upload all my work was pretty easy, I didn’t really use the actually wikispace because 99% of my work was uploaded from another application. At the beginning I used to get irritated with the page because my work would get deleted or appear on another students page but I then found it this was because I wasn’t giving each file I uploaded a unique name so it would get confused with other students files with a simpler name. When I realised this and I made show I named each of my files with a unique name and after doing this I didn’t come across any other problems.

TO CONCLUDE….

Using such a wide range of technologies has allowed me to learn new skills and increase my knowledge of the type of things out there for me to use for free. It also made my work look more attractive, because all my evaluations are used using different applications making each question look different and makes the whole evaluation & my general wikispace page look more interesting and appealing to look at.