Evaluation- How did you use new media technologies in the constructions and research, planning and evaluation stages?

As a group we have been effective in communicating with each other by using the smart phone messaging app 'Whatsapp'. We used this as apposed to normal SMS messaging because you can create group conversations rather than sending individual texts to each person. We also discussed any new ideas that we thought of out of lesson, rather than waiting until we were next together. This proved more effective and was generally useful when we were arranging to get together to film and edit. The use of this new media technology was vital to our project and without it, it would have been a lot more difficult to communicate with the rest of the group. As well as using new smart phone technology we also followed each others blogs and followed each others twitter account to also communicate with each other and keep up with what all the others are doing with their blogs. Twitter was also useful in getting feed back from other followers and by tagging each other in any posts to do with the documentary gave it broader feedback because four peoples followers is obviously better than one. YouTube is another social network that became useful in getting our documentary out there to get feedback. 


For the editing of our documentary we used Apple's iMovie. This was much better than Windows Movie Maker as it had better editing devices and was on the whole, generally more efficient. It was easy to import clips from the video camera straight into iMovie rather than to a file and then importing it from the file. The transitions were the most useful part of the software because it made it easier to edit between clips to make it flow more smoothly. We mostly use cross-blur, cross-fade and fade to black because they were the most effective for what we were trying to create. As well as this, we used some of the sound effects that were already installed with the software. For example we used the diagetic sound for the bell ringing as well as the sound of a busy room with people talking to add effect to the documentary. Overall, this was a very useful modern technology when creating our documentary, in comparison to other software available. 

Adobe's Photoshop is what I used to create my ancillary task; Poster and Double Page Spread. This was useful because it allowed me to freely edit my picture with lots of useful effects. Again this was easier to use for this particular project than Microsoft's Paint or Publisher because I could edit the pictures as well as make it into format of a poster and magazine spread. This was another modern media technology that was useful in creating 'Teaching Teens' for advertising.