Foundation Portfolio- The Evaluation- Question 6. What have I learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the process of designing our magazines, I have been taught how to use a wide variety of new programs such as Blogger, InDesign, Photoshop, and Survey Monkey. I’ve learnt how to open my own account and how to set up a blog to be used as a coursework post on Blogger and over the weeks I have been posting updates relating to my work every week. I’ve also learnt that unlike a Word document, blogs are not usually written with a large numbers of words that is usually about 250 or less. As for InDesign and Photoshop, I have learnt how to edit photographs taken from a digital camera for use as the main images on the front cover and contents page of the magazine. Although I have had difficulty working with these programs and learning how they work, particularly InDesign because I haven’t really been familiar with these complicated programs. Additionally I’ve been used to working with Microsoft programs for so long that I find it hard to adapt to new technologies, but I am beginning to understand how they work and hopefully I’ll have an easier time working with them in future projects. I came up against problem when learning about the new technologies, for example, when I was using Survey Monkey to write up and post a questionnaire, I didn’t receive any results and I had to go back to Microsoft Word to rewrite the questionnaire, print off a number of copies and hand them out to other students to fill out. Another problem I had was that due to the fact that my family mostly uses mobile phones to take photos and that I needed photos taken from a digital camera as their images had higher quality, it was hard to find images around the college, which were related to our subject matter. It was fortunate that the annual college production was being preformed at the Assembly Rooms and we were allowed to take photos of some of the sets to be used as images.