Evaluation

Overall I think the product isn't really successful as it could've been; our plan wasn't full proof, and had many flaws within it, and following it instead of making a "plan B", took down our whole project. Firstly my gantt chart said that everything must be finished by 28/2/2010, when we finally finished it in 18/3/2010, it was still not completely finished. Our original plan was that, the website will have a home page, benefits page, limitations page, pictures page, videos page and a forum page. Whereas the final product had: Homepage, benefits page and a forum page plus a process journal page. Such a small amount of pages wasn't enough to show everything we had accomplished. Although the information in those pages is vital, its not enough to explain and demonstrate how Skype helps school. If this was shown to DR. Hedger, it would be the same basic things he would see on any other Skype advertising site; nothing special.

I think the downfall of the website is completely my own fault, and I attest to that. I was really disorganized in the course of this project, when I realized that my gantt chart was wrong and had incorrect dates, I should've changed it. I also, later on in the project, decided to use a different web designer, which I should've added into ,y plan, so I would know what to do as I continued to do my project. The main reason why didn't do much, was too much reliance on my team members, when in turn they didn't do much themselves. I was also lazy for ht e fact, that there is too much work anyway and that on the last day I'll know what to write anyway. This was not the case, i should've done research beforehand and saved all my resources onto diigo, which I left aside for the whole project, because I was in a rush all the time and often forgot to save soruces. Next time I better make two plans, in case one fails, be attentive and do thing calmly; if I don't finish everything in school, doesn't mean the world is going to end, I can do more later at home.

The impact this website has on the life of others, namely the teachers and the students, is it makes life easier, when a child is sick at home, and teacher has to prepare work for that particular student. With Skype, the student can just chat with the teacher online, and the teacher can explain any hands-on activities the student needs to do; better yet the teacher can just set up Skype video chat, and just put it on a stand so the student can see the whole classroom and work along with them in each period. This will help both the student as well as the teacher; the student doesn't need to have any stress, since all his work is going to be done anyway, and when he comes to school, it will be much easier to "fit back in". The teacher has less work to do, as he doesn't need to waste his time on one particular student and preparing so much work for that one student. There's also a way this helps the environment; normally the teacher will need to print out a lot of work for the student. If its a irresponsible student, half of the sheets won't be done, which is a waste of paper. However, if the files are sent to the student via the fast accessible Skype, even the student doesn't do the work, no papers are being wasted, meaning the paper taken from so many trees can be used in other ways, such as for end of unit tests or reflections.

Overall, I think this project was a good experience, especially learning how to embed codes and learn html codes for your website, which was tough for me, even with a tutorial, but it will definitely help me when I get a job, say, if I need to make a website for my company, with pictures and videos.

Create Stage Journal Entry #3: 25/2/2010

Here's my site thus far:




Today I lost all my previous work from the previous lesson and therefore had to restart everything. Firstly, I had all the pictures for the website already saved on my computer's hard drive and so I uploaded them first. Then, I went to my diigo bookmarks and found the websites I was using yesterday for my research. I got the information back onto site, which took roughly 30 minutes.

The next step on my design was to add the following pages: A videos page, for all my videos created by the film maker in the group; a resources page, for all the sources used for the project (books, sites etc.); a forum page, for people who sign up for my website to discuss in and share ideas and suggestions to help us improve. This took about 10 minutes and was finished.

The problem I faced this lesson was losing my work, and because of this I learned a moral; always save your work multiple ways before taking a break from your work. After this incident, I saved my work via USB, sent a e-mail to myself and, saved it on the Mac and the HP elitebook.

Create Stage Journal Entry #2: 24/2/2010

Here are some of web designs I made this lesson to make up for my lost work:

Today I looked over my 4 designs (3 drafts and 1 final) and tried to decide which layout I would use for my website. The thing is, I wasn't able to create those types of designs on the website creator, webs.com. Because of this, I had to resort to another, more well known website designer, piczo.com. Within this website, I am given a wider range of designs and being able to create my own, instead of choosing created ones from the website, like webs.com.

I got reasonably far in completing my website design and worked on it for a good 20 minutes. Now I went back to my wikispaces page and decided to change the "Resources" in my design, because now I would use piczo.com instead of webs.com as my website designer. This took barely a minute.

The problems I faced today was basically the loss of time in searching for a new website designer instead of using webs.com. This alone caused me to lose more than half the lesson. But thankfully, the payoff was huge and piczo has proved to me to be the superior website designer, although it takes a while to load graphics, but unlike webs.com, it doesn't crash every 10 minutes.

Create Stage Journal Entry #1: 22/2/2010

In the past few weeks we've been working on our plan seeing how long we'll take to make the product, what we have to change in our designs and seeing if our designs fit the specification. If we didn't do any of the aforementioned steps we'd have to include what we'd have to do to make them fit the design specification in our plan. Another important step was listing the resources needed for making your product. (i.e. if you needed to make a website, you could use webs.com or piczo.com which are online website design tools).

Basically what you had to do in the plan stage was fix any flaws you found in your current design specification and design and how you would improve on them to hopefully get a 5 or 6 in your eventual created product. This was also done by peer edits when a classmate would walk over your computer screen and spot out some points in your plan that looked vague, weren't done, etc, etc. Based on the peer edits you had to improve your plan and finalize it so it can be ready to look back to when problems were faced in the create.

The problems I faced were not being able to create a proper gantt chart because I do not know how to use Microsoft Excel on Mac. Instead I decided to solve this problem by creating a simple table in which i wrote down the steps and how long each step would take for completion in days with given start dates and end dates.

Here's a screen shot of the said table:

Journal Entry #1 13/1/2010

Today I did my research on the i-phone because I find it the most interesting of the emerging technologies. This is because of the note card feature which we need in most of our note taking assignments. It also has a wide range of applications, such as wi-fi, internet access and bookmarking feature.