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.

Action plan for week beginning 22nd March

Here is my finished action plan for the week beginning the 22nd March. Overall, I think it does a good job of outlining my plans for each day, my progress and what else I still need to do.

26th March - Progress - template

After first working on a style sheet for the whole class, Sam and Alex put up the three ideas of templates we had, (shown below) and we were able to work out a style sheet for everyone to use, which is shown below also.

Here are Sam and Alex working on the style sheet after the three ideas the groups had.

Here is the template we all agreed to use for the newspaper.

Here is the step by step process of the template by which we all have to stick to. There are 3 columns, a main title, a strap line and crossheads for now. Then we will go on to add colour and pictures to the article. This template is to simply see how long the article is and how many pages it will take.

Potential pictures - taken ourselves

Me and Matt also took some pictures ourselves to avoid any copyright laws and restrictions. The pictures clearly relate to the article and because they are taken ourselves we also have a more student feel to the article. Below are the pictures we took ourselves on Friday the 26th March.



Here is a picture of an Iphone on TV Catchup.



Here is a picture of a person holding the Iphone, which we thought may appeal more to the students more.



Here is a picture of the Macbook on BBC iPlayer which we thought would be relevant to the article.

Here yet again is a picture of Matt using the Macbook on BBC iPlayer which we thought may appeal more to the viewer because someone is actually using it.

25th March progress

In today's lesson I worked on a home style guide with Mike, which consists of the rules we need in the articles, such as bullet points for lists, names italicised, quotes in bold and font sizes etc.

Shown below is Mikes and my rough draft. Mike continued with this after I started working on my article with Matt L. Matt and I also worked further on our article after working on feedback from nick, other students and also feedback from our client jenny grahame.

Here is a picture of the feedback slip which we received, and here are the notes for the feedback written out incase the image is not clear.

In terms of content, this is The Business - Loads of really useful info, which addresses the different exam qs in a very focused and helpful way. But because there's so much dense factual info, you need to think about your layout to make sure things stand out.

- Crossheads for different sections would be really useful - e.g. : The challenges to TV; Legal Issues; New contenders; the future? Preparing for the exam ect (but create your own sexier crossheads)

plus bullet points are often helpful to emphasise points -e.g. in your second paragraph, where there are tons of stats and your final 'Preparing for the exam' section.

Working on the Flatplan

I also worked further on a flat plan with Kirk, and after a while we realised with all the articles the size they were, we will have a big problem fitting them all into the article. After working out who would take a page and a half, 2 pages, or one page or even half a page, and adding everyone's articles in I realised we had forgotten about two articles which obviously we couldn't leave out. Therefore, we all need to make substantial cuts to the articles to fit them all in there, for example, Philippa's article needed to be cut down to one page, same with Alie's article and the same with Mine and Matt L's if we can manage it.

Hopefully, the groups should make these changes otherwise we cannot fit all the articles in the newspaper and some may need to be left out. I am sure after asking them on Friday most of them were willing to cut down. Me and kirk will also work further on the flat plan now with modifications on Monday.