financial accounts and costs

Shown below are my personal notes and copies of the financial accounts and costs for the print and distribution of our personal newspaper. It shows the outgoing costs so purchases for printing the newspaper and postage etc, and also shows the ingoing costs, such as the adverts costs, and copies of the newspaper sold so far.

Accounts

Outgoing costs

We as a class printed 500 copies of the newspaper at a £1 a newspaper, so therefore our overall outgoing costs for the Newspaper club was £500 inc VAT postage for first three orders, which was £11.40.

Income - Ingoing costs

For our incoming costs, we made a considerable amount through adverts.

For the Junction advert, we were given £350 for a newspaper advert.

For the Lincoln advert, we were given £100 for a half page newspaper advert.

For an OCR advert, we were given another £100 for a half page newspaper advert.

Total advertising income is £550 from the 3 adverts.

• Reigate school bought 120 copies of the newspaper for £60, adding £60 to the income profit.
• Islington college also bought 40 copies of the newspaper, which adds another £20 to the overall profit.
• Netherhall school bought another 30 copies of our newspaper, which was another £15 of the profit.
• Guernsey grammar school bought another 20 copies of the newspaper which adds another £10 to the overall profit made.

• There were also another 50 free copies/samples, given to the group members (us) the moderator etc.
• We still need to sell 260 copies of the newspaper, which should increase our profit costs further.
• We have sold 210 copies of the newspaper so far, which is a great achievement as we have sold almost half of all the newspapers we bought. These newspapers are to be advertised further by Jenny Grahame on OCR teachers site this week, so hopefully we aim to have sold all the copies through this method of advertising.

Total profit including adverts and distribution of newspapers - £655

This therefore in my opinion, is an excellent achievement in terms of a profit. We have made back our outgoing costs simply on adverts, so therefore any costs made now or at a later date, will be further cost and would be additional costs and even more of a profit.

Feedback after distribution

Shown below is also our feedback so far of the newspaper after distribution of the newspapers, so therefore this is new feedback.

Mary Berrisford, Islington

“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”

Jenny Grahame

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

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?"

Overall.. ( my thoughts)

• Overall, I personally think this feedback is very positive and has helped further analyse what we hoped to achieve. It sets clear our achievements and our targets, and the feedback we received has really helped analyse our overall progress. I think the colour we used in the newspaper was attractive to the audience and I hope that it was also visually interesting.
• The only negative or constructive feedback I can see is that the word search was blurry, which personally I agree with once you look at the newspaper. Unfortunately, the makers of the page used an image which was stretched too far and therefore became blurry when printed.
• Other than this, the point associated with my article especially was "is the point about not needing a TV license true?" from Reigate college. This was a very good point made, and I personally believe the quote as true, as the source we took it from is here - http://www.bitterwallet.com/5-reasons-why-you-can-cancel-your-tv-licence-tomorrow/10985

• However, once cutting the article down we may have made the statement we were trying to make a bit unclear and therefore it was inevitably going to cause confusion.
• Overall thought I think we had the majority of positive feedback and this is a great achievement because it means students can actually learn from the newspaper, exactly the aim we have held from the start.
  

Mike's blog feedback 3

Here is mike's feedback for my blog, this is the third time that he has given feedback. Overall, I think the feedback is helpful and there is only 2 videos I could add, so everything is up to date which is what I was aiming for. I will add the videos suggested by Mike and hopefully my blog should be sufficient with evidence.

Finished newspaper slideshow

Here is a slideshow that Kirk made to show all the pages of the finished newspaper, similar to a virtual flick through of the pages. This is good because it showed everyone's individual progress and all the individual pages. Here are some screengrabs from the slideshow.

However, Kirk has missed out mine and Matt's page of the newspaper, but there are screengrabs of the page on my blog anyway so this can be easily located.

Notes for presentation

Here are the following notes for the presentation part of the extended project. For notes to refer back to, here are the rough basics for the presentation.

• - The presentation can be in any form you want, for example I could use cards, slides, use the blog to refer back to, use websites or even present freestyle.

• - The presentation is designed to last 5 to 10 minutes, and I must address 4 main areas. It must be thorough and well detailed to ensure top marks, and cannot be too brief.

• - It must include the following area topics:

- What was the project about?

* what did I do?

* what was I making?

- What was your particular role and contribution?

*what jobs did I do?

*did I stay assigned to your role?

- How sucessful was the outcome?

*what went well?

*what went not so well?

*effective only partly? etc

- What did you learn from the process?

* did I learn actual content for the exam?

* Did I learn how to produce in print format, using templates etc?

* Did I learn new teamworking skills?

I also have to be asked questions about the project, so I could also prepare for these.

21st April - Final evaluation

Here is my evaluation for the extended project.

How well does it meet your original intentions?

The newspaper met my original intentions to an extent. We planned as a class to have articles related to the media critical perspectives exam and for them to be helpful and informative, with statistics and facts towards the exam, which students could quote or use to back up any points they made. Looking at the newspaper as a whole, most of the articles addressed these, especially Matt and my article, which I am pleased with for the original aim we wanted. We have clear facts and statistics to use, especially relating to the Media in the online age section of the exam. We had key questions to think about for the exam and key topics which could be raised. Some statistics from our article are shown below:

However, some articles did not relate to the exam at all and some thought that they were writing articles from their own personal view, which would not help anyone in the exam, because it was only one person's view. Alot of people wrote in a style where 'I think that.. 'coming from my experience of..' and this would not help students in the exam. Therefore, some students had to rush to change their articles so they could actually get them in the newspaper, and some decided to just have them online instead.

One thing I am dissapointed about is the fact that we didn't address question 1A of the exam very much at all, everybody wrote articles about the other aspect of the exam, for question 1B. We only addressed 1B after teacher feedback and someone actually being assigned to write about 1B, which is dissapointing. I think that nobody wanted to write about it because it wasn't as exciting as the other aspect. Nonetheless, we should have wrote about question 1B from the start and then we wouldn't have had to rush more near the end of the project. Overall however I am pleased with the finished project.

How does it look?

I think that the newspaper looks very efficient, and very much like a student newspaper which I am pleased about. We did not want the newspaper to look too business like, so we aimed at making it colourful and vibrant, with formal language to a lesser extent than a business newspaper such as The Guardian.

I like the look of the newspaper and think the articles are colouirful and attractive which make you want to read them. I think the activities page and everything looks interesting and am pleased to say the newspaper is something I would sit down and read, so am pleased with the finished outcome.

How pleased are you with your contributions?

I am very pleased with the contributions I made towards the newspaper and think that I did as much work as I personally could towards the project. My first job was the quality control team job of ensuring people had evidence on their blogs of work, this included a whole Flickr account with 70 odd pictures all showing people working, which could be easily added to the blogs. I also sent reminder emails ensuring everyone used pictures on their blogs, and made sure everyone knew the sign in for the Flickr account.

My second job was to write an article with Matt L about media in the online age, we chose to write about the abolishment of TV in the household due to new TV streaming websites such as BBC Iplayer and ITV player, 4OD and TV Catchup. I chose this job personally to do because I also wanted to have an article in the newspaper, as it would be good for experience. Therefore, I think that I did as much work for the project as I could handle, and I thought I worked effectively at this. Although I may have chosen another job to do as well, I think this did not distract me from anything because the article was made collectively with Matt L and therefore I did not have to write as much as I would have. Below is a picture of the finished article.

I originally wanted to be a part of a team creating a page for the newspaper, so the quality control team job was a good step up for me and I felt I did a lot more work than I would have done if I had just been assigned the job of a team member.

How effectively do you think you worked in your role and others in theirs?

I think I worked very effectively in my role, and I don't think my added job of writing an article distracted me from my main job, I thought that this gave me more to do which I liked because I like a challenge in terms of work, and I like to have a lot to do. I think the rest of the quality control team worked well in their roles, especially Kirk who monitored everyone's progress, and made clear schedules for days, activities and ensured everyone stayed working. Mike also worked well, creating as blog for feedback for everyone, and giving clear instructions on what else to add to their blogs, and what things were missing.

I also think the team leaders worked well, managing their teams effectively, although there was some tension because some other people like to take control, the team leaders worked well and managed their teams effectively, despite the fact they were sometimes not there and team members were confused about what to do - they overall worked well in managing their teams.

Team members worked well too, and mainly all made a page or article for the newspaper. Some articles did not really realte to our original aim which I was dissapointed about, but once getting on with their work after clear instruction most were able to change and edit their articles so they could fit in the newspaper. Most team members showed clear effort, despite the fact they do not like writing academically.

What could be learnt from this experience?

A lot of considerable points can be learnt from this experience, especially the fact that it shows we can work well as a class when given the correct roles. Another clear thing to learn is that most people need clear instructions in order to complete work but once they do, they work effectively as a team. We need an aim from the start so we can stick to the objective, but as a class we work well.

Another main point is that despite some of the class not meeting deadlines individually, we can all meet deadlines as a team and this is a good achievement. We met the print deadline effectively, although some people were left with more work to do than others, for example I came into the lesson to work on unfinished pages despite finishing my own page already, but I didn't mind this as I knew we needed to meet the deadline effectively.

What has been learnt from previous experience?

From previous experience, we can learn that despite some projects where we did not work as a team effectively, for example the SHOW project, this project showed that we could work collectively as a team when we are assigned the correct roles - and can create an effective extended project and also meet the deadlines.

Previous experience showed us who could work in what roles effectively and who struggled when given managerial roles - and this helped us when choosing roles for the class.

Nonetheless overall, I think myself and the class worked extremely well in terms of meeting the deadlines, in terms of creating an effective newspaper which meets our original intentions, and also in terms of working as a team, which it showed we can do when we put our minds to a project. I think I worked very well in terms of following my role, despite also doing additional work of writing an article with Matt L. I think the extended project went well and I have monitored my progress effectively, keeping a work blog of what I did each day, what I thought about it and what else I needed to do.

Overall project plan

Here is my personal and overall project plan for the extended project. I think it reflects clearly my personal roles and things i need to do.

Action plan for week beginning 29th March

Here is my final action plan for the extended project, which shows my progress, plans and what I still need to do each day of the project. Overall, I think I have assessed daily progress etc well in each action plan and I think the action plans will be good as evidence to show work completed and by who.

1st April - individual progress

Today I worked individually on finishing off and modifying any further changes that needed to be made to the newspaper. Below you can see some screen grabs of the work I completed today.

The first change I made was to the front page of the newspaper, I added the links to where the rest of the articles could be found online if they were not put in the newspaper, and also a link to petes media blog which is also considerably helpful for help in the exam. I then continued by adding everyone's names to the front to show that we made the newspaper collaboratively.

I then startd to make little changes to the pages which were not finished, and added the text of media word search to the left of the word search on the activities and adverts page.

Here you can see me playing about with text and working on the text and colour.

Here you can see the final page after I made this modification.

Next, I added the two logos of the junction and the cambridgeshore city council onto the other activities and adverts page. I then also added in the text which needed to be added and formatted this according to the style sheet and house style guide. I then also played about with the size of logos etc to see the effectiveness and the layout of the text. I managed to almost finish this to what I think would be suitable to the newspaper and I think Nick will make the rest of the small modifications.

Overall, I personally thought I did well with the two pages and individually managed to finish off the last bits of the newspaper ready for the printing deadline.

31st March - Front page of the newspaper

Today myself and the rest of the quality control team worked on the front page of the newspaper, because it still had not been completed.

We first worked on adding the media me logo which I designed, and then worked on adding the editorial text Alex wrote, after I wrote the introductory paragraph and put it in bold text.

When we got to this point it was the end of the lesson, so me, kirk and mike stayed behind after lesson to finish the front page.

We then added four coloured boxes to the left hand side of the newspaper, advertising certain articles, we advertised mine and Matt L's article Time to turn off TV for good?, James' article Spike Jonze to Telephones, Alies article Has Twitter changed Communication and Tim's Tube Map.

In the end we managed to almost finish the front page, which I agreed to personally finish tomorrow. I felt this was a great achievement because we stayed behind after lessons to finish it and in the end I felt proud of the fact we worked on it collaboratively and it turned out looking professional and attractive.

Final Flatplan video

Here is the flatplan video with the audio recorded from the planning session, which show the progress we made and the decisions we made as a team. Kirk recorded the audio, but overall it shows our work as a team and shows decisions we made, it is very effective in showing progress and evidence.

31st March - Progress

Today we were able to complete some substantial progress for the magazine, The first thing we did as a class was to arrange the pages of the newspaper and what should go where. The quality control team with myself and the 3 teams came up with page orders.

Here at first were the 11 pages we had at the start, and with 12 pages to fill we had a problem. Therefore, Sam came up with the idea of having an activities page on the top half of 2 seperate pages, and the adverts on the bottom half - which I thought was an interesting way to break up the pages, as a page with 2 adverts on personally I think people would just flick past and not take notice - but if there were activities this would make a difference.

Here you can see Alex (the liason officer for the quality control team) rearranging the big flat plan of the newspaper on the board to meet the page suggestions we thought.

Here you can see my personal notes on the quality control team's order of the pages. I thought to order the pages in order of relevance and having the adverts at the back of the newspaper would be good because i will draw peoples attention. Also having the activities near the back page makes it a good way to finish the articles in the newspaper.

This arrangement of the flat plan I think was Philippa's teams, and they said to put the activities page on page 5 because it breaks up the articles. I like this idea better than simply our quality control teams idea of having the activities near the back page, because I think it would break up the articles and people would take more notice of the activities.

Here you can see Loz (team leader) re arranging the flat plan on the board.

Here you can see the final order for the newspaper. Notes are below:

page 1 - front cover

page 2 - question 1A of the exam

page 3 - time to turn off TV for good? (Mine and Matt L's article)

page 4 - Is Wikipedia an online blessing?

page 5 - Lincoln advert and activities

page 6 - Tim tube map (double page spread)

page 7 - Tim tube map (double page spread)

page 8 - Lincoln advert and activities

page 9 - Wikipedia world tour (activity)

page 10 - Has Twitter changed communication?

page 11 - zeitgeist forecast

page 12 (back page) - online gaming communities

Overall, there were a lot of various changes and discussions about the ordering of the pages in the newspaper. From the quality control team and my first ideas, not a lot has changed and therefore people liked the order we had put the pages in, which was good.

We managed to make the activities and the adverts on pages 5 and 8 so that the tube map could be a pull out poster if neccessary with activities to do, a point made by Loz which I personally thought was a great idea, it also breaks up the articles quite substantially.

The gaming communities articles by Ash and Dave are now on the back because they were the most visually interesting articles, and we felt it would be something constructive for students to look at.

Overall I felt we moved forward quite a lot in Today's first lesson and were able to make some considerable decisions for the newspaper, as well as a clear and consistent order.

Flickr

Matt L also uploaded these pictures to the Flickr account for me, which was very helpful. Throughout the project I have been uploading photos of progress and evidence to back up what we have done, because my main role is to keep evidence. I feel the Flickr account and photos are an excellent way to keep evidence alongside the activity logs. Overall there are 135 photos in the Flickr account which the majority of I have uploaded, and I think this is a fantastic achievement for evidence purposes.

Feedback from Mike

Here is my feedback from Mike, and as you can see there is not a lot to do which is good. Overall, I think this feedback is accurate as i have kept on task for everything and made sure everything is done so I can keep on track.

30th March - Final Article JPG

Here is mine and Matt L's final article as a JPEG file. It shows the work we have done, what we have changed and what we have edited. The article is now going for proof reading from Nick and Pete, so we may have a few more changes to make to it, but overall it is mostly completed which means we have successfully kept to our article completion deadline.

30th March - Article proof reading

Matt L and I also wanted to proof read the article once more before handing it in, and as we had looked at it so much and would be less likely to notice little mistakes, we asked kirk to look through the article, (shown below) and give us some proof reading comments. This will help us further on our article and will make sure it is checked through thoroughly.

Here you can see kirk looking through our article.

Here you can see him giving us feedback with the original article he added comments to.

Here you can see a close up of the feedback.

Here you can see the article with all of kirks comments.

Final rough Flatplan draft - Video

Here is our final rough draft flat plan before we get feedback from Jenny and Pete about what to cut out from the article. From looking at the flat plan, we can see that we have one spare page left with 3 potential articles too which all fill a page, and therefore we need to cut some articles out of the newspaper.

Online method

Pete mentioned yesterday about having an online site for more articles, similar to Media Magazine. I think this is a great idea and will mean students will have more to use to revise.

29th March - Flat plan

In today's second lesson I also worked on the final rough flat plan with Kirk and Alex, and we managed to fit most of the substantial articles in there, but after jenny's next set of feedback she should indicate which ones need to go or could go as currently we still do not have enough room for all the articles.

Here is our front of our flatplan.

Here is the middle page of the flat plan.

Here is the back page.

Overall, I think that the flat plan will also really help us indicate how much space we have or need for all the information we want to put on the newspaper. After one more set of feedback from Jenny after the feedback in the pages template, we should have a clear indication of what articles we can keep and what are not so relevant.

29th March - Progress

During the first Monday lesson, we worked on a brainstorm which helped with answering questions 1A and 1B of the exam, which we have not focused on yet. It really helped to understand the basics of the questions and I feel i have a better understanding now of the first part of the exam.

Here is our brainstorm which i created in a group with Sam and Mike. We did a brainstorm of the creativity part of the questions 1A and 1B, and used specific examples of our own work aswell as examples of what we have done during the projects. We completed this brainstorm for another group to use and give feedback on, and therefore we recieved another brainstorm to write about.

Here is us working on our brainstorm and adding details.

Here is our brainstorm close up to see the detail we added.

Here is another close up of our brainstorm.

Here is a close up of the brainstorm we received back, and we were asked to write about using conventions of real media products during our work and how these have progressed. I wrote an essay example and felt this really helped me to understand the process of the first two questions of the exam.

29th March - Working further on the article

Today we worked further on our article, adding more images and a boxout with helpful key links. Below you can see Matt L and I working further on our article.

Here you can see us adding a boxout to the article, and adding the pictures again to fit around the text, we also gave them a smoother edge to the sides of the picture.

Here you can see our almost completed article, we only need to add Matt's opie and then we are done. This afternoon we will add it and then we will be ready to send the final version to Alex to send to Jenny and Pete.

Here are some pictures which we used in our article. They are enlarged on the blog but we have taken them ourselves which means we are not breaching any copyright laws.

Overall I think Matt L and I have worked hard to meet the deadline and I am glad we have met it successfully. I think our article covers a lot of useful points for students to use in the exam and also has key questions for the students to think further about, as well as key links.

Work at home - Cutting down the article

Today I did some work at home, and Matt L and I managed to cut down our article so it all fitted onto one A3 page. I felt there was some good information and useful stuff cut out but we had to cut it down due to the article fitting in the newspaper. Below you can see me begin to cut down the article in pages. I have also taken screen grabs while working for evidence.

Cutting down the text

Here you can see me working with the template and the text in Pages, after opening the article we worked on Friday.

Here you can see me start to cut down some of the information which Matt L and I thought was less essential than the rest, and you can see it is starting to fit all on one page.

Here you can see all of the article now fits on one A4 page which will look the same on an A3 page.

Overall

Baring in mind we still need to add pictures and need to illustrate the article a little more may need to be cut out, nonetheless I think we have done well in keeping the most important bits of information in the article.

Adding images

Matt L and I have also worked on adding some images to the article , which we thought we would have to cut more text out. However, I have managed to add two small images and all of the article still fits on one page, which is good news. Below is the process I took to adding some images to the article.

Here you can see the folder which the images we took ourselves are in. I decided to only use a couple of these because we did not want to cut much more of our article text out.

Here you can see me choosing the images to add to the article from the pictures we took ourselves for our article on Friday.

Here you can see the same process of me choosing images and adding them to the article to see which ones look best.

Here you can see I have added the second picture to the article and resized it so it is little, I have also created an opacity border in the inspector part of pages, so it is not a hard square image in the article for a softer look to the image.

Here you can see the whole version of the article we now have ready for Monday, with the two images I have added and all the text now all fitting on one page.