What have you learnt about technologies

from the process of constructing this product?

During the production of my coursework, I used many different technologies and gained a lot of knowledge about them that I did not have previously. These include:

Facebook is the most popular social networking sight in the world. This proved to be very useful for organisational purposes and research during my project. I used Facebook to communicate with the people who appeared in my photo shoot, to arrange locations and times to meet and discuss any other issues.

I also used Facebook as a form of primary research. I added a status to my profile which asked people of my target age range to get in touch with me if they would like to give me some feedback on my magazine. Many people replied, so this was very successful!

Photobucket is an image hosting website which allows you to upload many images. I created a folder on the website where I uploaded all pictures I took. The website then allows me to copy the html which embeds a slideshow of these photographs onto my blog. Although I could upload images directly to my blog, this was more time efficient and also made my blog looked well organised.

Slideshare is an internet website which allows you to upload PowerPoint presentations. This was a very useful tool for me during coursework production! In posts where I had a lot of information and images to upload, I simply created a PowerPoint presentation with this information and uploaded it to Slideshare.com. I could then embed the PowerPoint onto my blog, so the information is there in a more organised and structured way.

Slideshare.com

When taking photographs for my coursework, I preferred to use the digital SLR camera as the quality of picture is better and I also learned how to use the camera for things such as adjusting focus, adapting the image to different lighting settings and zooming in and out.

I used these cameras for the photo shoots of my main task and subsidiary task, and I think my photography skills have definitely improved due to all the practice!

Digital SLR Camera / Ordinary digital camera

Serif Photo Plus

This photo editing software helped me to edit my photographs in many different ways! It allowed me to resize, crop and rotate images, adjust colour settings, add photographic effects such as lighting and I also created my whole magazine using this programme. It has a large variety of tools which helped me create my magazine, however one limitation was that the files were too large to upload to my blog. To combat this, I copied the image into Paint software and uploaded it as a JPEG file. My skills using this have greatly improved.

Blogging website

I used Blogger.com to document my coursework. It allows you to create different blogs and posts, including ways of uploading videos, images and embedding documents such as PowerPoint presentations. It was an excellent way of structuring my coursework, and helped me with time managament as I knew my teachers could see when, and what, I was posting.