4. How did you use new media technologies in the constuction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The Internet played a big part in the research section of my production. This allowed me to access paper’s websites easily for all across the country and assess the similarities and differences in the newspapers in different areas. This was restricted however due to not being able to view the whole paper online. It did allow me to look at different editions of the same paper and see the way house style is used. The main website I used for this was “www.newspaperarchive.com” which has all the days newspaper front covers from across the globe. I could then copy and paste these into a “Microsoft Word” document to save them. The Internet was also very useful when researching my radio advert as it gave me the opportunity to easily access adverts on demand instead of having to listening to the radio normally and waiting for the adverts. This made my research much easier and more efficient.

The Internet was also useful in the construction of my production, helping me in my newspaper and poster. In the production of my newspaper I used the Internet to gather a range of fonts for headings, text and adverts in my newspaper, for example in the banner for my supplements where I used a font called “Famous” from the website “www.101fonts.com”. I also used this in my poster. This was a good site to use because the ranges of fonts were better than the ones on the Microsoft software.

Digital software was very important when considering my pictures. First of all I used a digital camera to take the still images and transport them onto my computer. I then used a photo manipulating program called “Adobe Photoshop Elements” to edit the images, mostly just changing the brightness and contrast due to the tight conventions of a local newspaper. My skills were fairly good on this program because creating an magazine in my AS course which used this program a lot.

In each area of my production I used a range of software. The main piece of software I used was, “Microsoft Publisher”, a desktop publishing application that I created my newspaper and poster on. It allowed me to arrange text, using text boxes, and pictures on to templates or plain documents and add colours and backgrounds, using the fill tool. I also used this software in my AS coursework when creating my preliminary task, a magazine, and my main task, also a magazine. “Microsoft Publisher” allow you to choose from a number of layouts and easily arrange text and pictures.

While creating my radio advert the main program I used was “Garageband” which is a audio manipulation program. This allowed me to record voices and sounds and layer them using the track tool. I could also gather jingles and other sound effects from the library of sounds and copyright free music.

The final digital software I used was my blog, which was on “Blogshot.com”. This was useful because it allowed me to record my progress on a daily basis, showing all my findings and the decisions I made. It also allows me to easily present all my work in one place.