How did you use new technologies in research and

planning stages?Evaluation Question 4 (Part 1)

New Technologies?What are the new technologies that the 21st Century has brought us? To cover a few:- Blogger as a website to feature the rest of the work - We have the emergence of the internet and Google as a way of finding information, pictures, videos and an assortment of other useful things that allow me to quickly and efficiently study media. - Websites such as Prezi, Slideshare, Emaze and Mindmeister were brilliant in allowing simple ways of presenting my planning and research in a professional looking manner. - YouTube allowed me to be able to watch videos and learn how certain things were done (Such as Pleasant-Ville effect or Green Screening) and to watch/view other pieces of media such as short films, classic film noir films and other A-Level pieces of work at the click of a button.

How did I use these ‘new technologies’?

In used these new technologies in my research and planning to present my findings (Research) and layout my work for future reference (Planning)

I had to learn a lot about Film Noir and short films at the beginning of the course, so being able to quickly Google search the relevant information and then be able to show and visually present my findings was very useful in moving forwards with the production.

Blogger is the website which holds my blog to showcase all of my work. The website is extremely efficient in being able to quickly make a blog that people can follow and track your work/progress. It is the perfect template for making a blog without having to code the website yourself.

Positives- Easy to navigate, simple to set up and run at simple levels, great at being a canvas for other work, accessible.

Negatives- Sometimes troublesome (Assigning certain pages to appear), HTML code for embedding videos/presentations can be tedious,

Examples

Prezi is a presentation software that is used as a way of presenting presentations online with relative ease. I believe it was on of my most used websites, using it to showcase my ideas and findings on all the short films I researched and my initial thoughts upon researching short films.

Positives- Easy to use, Looks professional, Many features, Great for quickly presenting ideas in a visual format, Works with Blogger (HTML embedding etc), accessible anywhere (Online)

Negatives- Easy to overuse, Limited feautures, Difficult to not use simple templates,

Example

Slideshare is another presentation software, that is based online and serves as an online Microsoft Powerpoint with less features, more tedious controls/limitations. The limited parameters associated with the website made me use it very sparlingly as the poor image importing was extremely frustrating when trying to create a presentation that didn’t simply contain just text.

Positives- Quick to access, Able to make quick slideshows of text/images, an alternative to Prezi.

Negatives - Tedious limitations, images are difficult to use/insert, small assortment of features, frustrating controls.

Example

Emaze is again similar to Microsoft Powerpoint but online, like Slideshare, though it has many more features than Slideshare and features many useful templates created by many other users, all of which come with various colour schemes so you can mix and match till you get your desired look. I found this website very useful as a substitute in presenting my work/research.

Positives - Easy to use, Looks professional, variety of templates, Great for quickly presenting ideas in a visual format, Works with Blogger (HTML embedding etc), accessible anywhere (Online)

Negatives- Some complicated features, frustrating image uploading feature.

Example

Mindmeister is a great way to jot down ideas online, as it is simply an online mind-map maker. This made it easier to jot down ideas quickly, while also presenting them in a clear fashion for other people to see. What I really liked about Mindmeister is that is was simple to use but the website limits accounts to only 3 mindmaps unless they are a premium member, which I considered frustrating later on in my planning/research stages.

Positives- Easy to use, Professional look, simple features/look allowed for ideas to be conveyed easily

Negatives- Limited usage

Example

YouTube is a website that allows for videos to be uploaded and viewed by users. YouTube as a result was crucial to my research, as I was able to view films and learn how to do things in preparation for my production. It aslo allowed me to upload videos of my work/examples of my work so I can host them on Blogger and present them.

Positives- Easy to use, Easy to upload, Comments section for feedback/discussion, slick look, huge library of videos/content for usage.

Negatives- Search function makes it difficult to find niche research items