Final Blog

The Best of Multimedia Apps & Tools

This has been my favorite CCV course that I have taken so far, partly because I really enjoyed the subject and it's something I'm really interested in but also because the assignments were fun and I learned a lot doing them. I really enjoyed taking and editing photos, so the projects like the photo story which is featured below, and our final project or some of my favorites. They gave me a new way to share my photos with people and create a story with them. WeVideo is a program that I had never heard of before this class, and I really liked it. Some video programs are really complicated and hard to use but I found I was able to follow along pretty well and to make some awesome videos using it.

 

What I learned

I think that one of the most universally useful saying that I learned about the semester was fair use and copyright because I really did not know much about it. When I was in high school I was taught that we needed to cite our sources but I never even heard of fair use, so I was not really using other people's work the way I should be. Blogging is another thing that I don't have a lot of experience with and I thought it was really useful to know how a Blog should be formatted and to get some practice with logging. I think that my blog has definitely improved since my first one which was just one long paragraph with no photographs or headings it's a really good way for us to reflect on everything that we learned and to sort through our thoughts and difficulties that we had over the week.

My Final Project

With our final project I was pretty comfortable with WeVideo so I thought it was going to go pretty well, and for the most part it did. I did have one problem, the last time that I logged into my WeVideo to go over everything and make some final changes, some setting has been changed so that all the vertical photos were being set to a zoomed blurry background. It took a lot of searching and messing around with things before I found out how to fix it but eventually I found it under the edit button on the photos. I'm really happy with the way that my video turned out and it's on a subject that I really care about Christmas is always been my favorite time of year. It reminds me of my childhood and all the happy times that my family shared.

Data Visualization: Maps

Data Visualization Maps

Data is a really important tool to use to back up what you are claiming, and you can even find out some really interesting things just by collecting data. I thought that the video The Age of Insight: Telling Stories with Data was really interesting because I hadn't thought of it that way before. Of course data has been used for a long time to find some sort of conclusion for example the population of the country like the image on the right, but there can be really interesting stories created with data. I loved the example of the journalist who would answers readers questions with a data story because it is a great way to make our society more informed and educated.

Google Fusion Table

When I was attempting to using to use Google Fusion Table, I ran into a couple problems. It seemed like a really good idea because even after I made it, it would keep updating as more people filled out my survey, however somewhere in the many steps something went wrong. My computer said that Google hadn't approved the app yet so it would not allow it, so I am not sure if it was something I did wrong or if it was my computer but I chose to use My Maps instead.

My Maps

I created my form pretty late because I had a busy and hectic week so I did not get as many responses as I had hoped, but I chose to do mine on where you would want to go on Vacation anywhere in the United States. My maps was really easy to use, so I didn't feel like it would be that much of an inconvenience to go back and update it if I get more data. I like that when you click on the location point, it pulls up the reason why the people wanted to go on vacation there which was the other question in my google form.

People's Ideal Vacation Spots in the USA

Data Visualization

Data Visualization 

I really liked how Garr Reynolds says that data should be presented because all too often in school I found myself looking at a powerpoint slide or a piece of paper with way too much going on, and it's overwhelming. He suggested that you present one idea at a time which makes it a lot easier to focus. He also highlighted using the right graph to represent your data so that it can be easily understood. This is really important because if the data is not represented well, the point that it is showing may not be understood. Hans Rosling's video did a really great job of this while also making the it really interesting and visually pleasing with the floating points on the graph that he pushed around.

"Calling Bullshit"

Getting the data in the first place is also really important and where you are getting it from. "Calling Bullshit" is an awesome way to inform students about all of the information that is out there that is simply not true. It is really important that your information is accurate otherwise people are not going to take you seriously and it could get you in a lot of trouble. 

Ice Cream

I decided to my infographic on ice cream because it is my favorite sweet treat and I thought it would be fun topic to share some information on. I had a similar project in another class last week where I had to gather date and I used SurveyMonkey, but I really liked that Google Forms is connected to all of my other Google stuff. It was really easy to use and the spreadsheet tool is really handy. 

Canva

I used Canva to create my infographic because I really liked the way that some of their templates looked. I have used Google slides a lot so I wanted to try something different and I didn't end up using any of the templates, but I used them for inspiration. I liked that you could search for pictures right their in the app, it made it really easy to find pictures I could use. I was really happy with how my infographic came out and I would definitely use this program again. 

Prezi

Experience

I was introduced to Prezi in high school where I used it for some of my presentations, and I found that I liked it a lot more than the traditional slide presentation. Prezi is much more engaging as you can add more movement and hidden parts. This also makes it so that everyone's presentations are different, rather than just flipping through slide after slide.

Staff Picks

The prezis that were in the staff picks we're obviously much more advanced than anything I have created, but it is possible for anyone to create a really good presentation like those. The background of the prezis were interactive with the slides, for example it would zoom through a window to a slide with photos of the interior of the building. That was another thing that I liked, it is really easy use, but looks complex and well put together in the end. The twists and the different zoom locations make it flow, and it really seems like you know what you're doing.

New

A new feature that I hadn't known about before was making the background of the Prezi a photo. I took advantage of this in my prezi with a photo that I though captured my favorite part of the presentation, the Florida sunsets. It gives the presentation more depth and it really sets the tone as well.

Troubles

I have had some trouble uploading my Prezi to my blog, there is only an empty rectangle where is should have loaded, so here is the link in case it never loads. I tried copying the link many different times and it doesn't seem to work. However, overall I would definitely choose Prezi over other presentations.

Presentations

Presentations

I thought that this weeks topic was really fun, I have always enjoyed making presentation in class. I enjoy doing things that allow me to be creative and I think that knowing how to make a good presentation is also really important. They are not just useful for school, you might have to create one at work someday or for some other occasion, and it is good know to know how to make a presentation that is not

Tips

The articles that gave Garr Reynolds' tips on how to make a better presentation we're really helpful and I think that they all had good points. Keeping it simple was a theme through all of them and I can certainly agree that this helps the people watching the presentation. If you want the audience to be focused on what your are saying to them, it is key to not have too much going on in your slides, especially text. The audience will want to read the text and then they won't be listening to you. Another important thing that they said was to keep it short, after a while the audience will start to get bored so keeping things short and simple help keeps people attentive.

Using WeVideo

I used my photos that I put in my presentation as my backgrounds, only having one photo per slide, and made sure that there were only a few words on each slide. In my video presentation using WeVideo, I explained those slides more in depth, but the audience did not have to listen to me and try to read the slides because they easy and quick to read. I thought that WeVideo worked really well for making the presentation. The only thing that I thought would be better is if you could switch from the web camera to the screen view while recording, but I thought that I was able to make it work with the separate clips.

Passion & Creativity Presentation

Creativity Collaboration

Creativity & Photo Stories

Creativity

I was very excited about this weeks learning assignment because I love taking pictures. My boyfriend, featured in the video, complains because I am always taking photos, especially when they are of him. I like to be creative in that way, taking photos from different angles, drawing, etc. while he likes to take apart vehicles and figure out what is wrong with them. Creativity comes in different disguises, which I think relates to what Sir Ken said. My boyfriend is a good example of this, because while he did not the best when in regular school, when he was allowed to go to a technical school to do an automotive program, he excelled. This is similar to Sir Ken's story of Gillian Lynne who was a dancer and became very successful.

Photo Story

I chose to do my photo story on a hike that my boyfriend and I went on the other morning. The photos include the peaceful views, a shelter we found, and my boyfriend, some close up photos others not. I tried to vary the style of the photos. I do not have a lot of experience with making videos, but after watching the couple videos, I found it very easy to use. I liked that they had a lot of music to choose from and I was able to find one that I thought fit with my video which was even called "outdoor adventure". I found it a little tricky to move things around once the transitions were in there because it would change the length of the clips, but I was able to figure it out.

Boston Globe Photo Story

I looked at the World Aquatics Championship photo story on the Boston Globe's page. Their photos were obviously of much higher quality, but I aspire to one day be able to take photos like and learn how to edit them as well. There were a lot of photos and a lot of different views, and I thought this was a cool topic because the action shots come out really interesting. There are also some really funny faces made when they are competing, but the coolest part is when the water has not yet broken and they are in almost a bubble of water.

Audio Recording and Video Hosting

Music

Music is a really important piece of whatever it may be in, because as the video Don't Forget the Music says, it portrays the emotion of your video. The example video that he uses with different songs in the background, shows how the music can change the implications of the entire scene. There were also a lot of great resources for copyright free music that you can use and they were easy to download.

Audio Recording

I remember a long time ago, doing an assignment in chorus where we used garage band, which is the closet thing that I have used to Sountrap. It was not hard to learn, partially from the help of the video but also because it is fairly easy to use. I liked how it was easy to move clip around and change the length of them so that I could experiment and see what sounded best. I also thought that it was really helpful that had music clips in the app that you can use so you don't have to search the internet to find one. I did not have a microphone, so I was a little worried that the recording was not going to sound good, but it was actually loud and clear. 

Youtube

YouTube is one of the social medias that I have not explored much. When I want to find a tutorial on how to do something I go to YouTube, however I don't use it much other than that. I am glad that we are exploring this because I know that YouTube is actually a really big thing right now and I would like to learn more about how to be a part of it. I had no idea that you could post videos on YouTube privately, so that was something new I learned.

Jasmine reading a poem

Cloud Computing

Cloud Storage

When I started this week, I knew that cloud storage was a way of storing your files other than on your computer, however I did not know where they were. When I thought of the cloud, all I could think was files just floating around in the sky, but of course I knew this was not realistic. 

After reading the New York Times article, I learned that the files are stored on hard drives mostly owned by larger companies. The files can also move across different servers which makes for much more efficient computers. 

Safety

When I first hear about cloud storage, especially not knowing much about it, I thought that it was not a very safe way to keep my files. It seemed that if my files were out there on other people's hard rives that it would people more access to them. However, the article mentioned above says that your files are actually safer in the cloud. After thinking about it, it made sense because there are billions of other files that they are stored with, so the chances of your files being stolen or compromised are actually much smaller.

Google vs Microsoft

When comparing Google and Microsoft, I found that at first glance there are not that many differences between the two, even their logos are similar. I am much more familiar with Google's apps so it seemed a lot simpler and easier to me. I also thought that Google had a lot more apps to choose from, and some useful features in the editor that Microsoft didn't have. The most important one was the discover tool in Google Docs which allows you to search the internet right from your document. As the Ted Talk by Daniel Russell explains, we can get answers to any question so easily now, which is especially true with the discover tool. There are even tools like Google Scholar that help find articles that are reliable. Even thought Microsoft is perfectly capable of completing your everyday tasks, I would choose Google because of those tools, and because I like the color scheme and easy access from my google chrome browser. 

Blogs and Websites

My Learning

This week we worked on blog design and website platforms. I found this week really helpful as far as the blog aspect, and really interesting when it came to the website side. 

Blog

My blog really needed some upgrades and the articles that we read this week really helped me figure what to do as I will discuss later. I was not really sure what a blog should look like because this class is the first time I have done anything with blogs. While I was looking at the blogs that the articles gave as examples, specifically Fubiz the one I mentioned in my discussion, I noticed that they were a lot more complex than the blogs that we have for this class. One of the points about having a good blog was to make it simple so as not to distract from the content. Fubiz, and a lot of the other blogs did this while making it complicated enough to still captivate the eye. It showed me how different blogs can be from each other and how much more there is to learn. 

Websites

I always thought that a website was something that only professionals could have or people with a business. While I did discover that it was possible for anyone to make a website before now, I did not realize how easy it was. I think that it is a really good resource to be able to make a website as simple and easy as google sites makes it. Not everyone is gifted when it comes to technology, and making things like making a website easier, includes more people into the world of technology which is huge today.

My Blog

As I mentioned before, simplicity was mentioned a lot, specifically in the article "5 Keys To Make Your Business Blog Visually Awesome" at the very beginning. As I looked over my blog, I saw that while it was simple, it was almost too simple but not in the right ways. My posts were not broken up very well, with only a couple paragraphs and no headings, so I went through my posts and found where I thought headers and paragraphs should go so it is much easier to read now. 

The colors of my blog did not go well together and the article mentioned before says that colors of your blog set the tone for the reader. I decided to change my background to a soft blue mountain scene, and I changed the theme to a simple translucent white box, rather than the red that was there before. 

I was a little frustrated when it came to the fonts because I could not find how to change some of them. However, I did change the font of my titles and kept the normal text as simple as possible with a white background, for easy reading. 

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/jasmines-photography/home

Taking pictures is something that I really enjoy doing, especially since I spent too much money on a nice camera. This is why I decided to make my website about my photography. Overall I really like Google sites, especially because I am a beginner at website making. Everything was really simple and easy to figure out. At first I had no idea where to start so I decided to explore some photography websites for some inspiration. I wanted most of the focus to be on my photos so I did not put a lot of text in, but I did add some text boxes in order to explain some of the photos. I liked that it was really easy to move things around so that I could change things as I went along.

I had a lot of fun with this weeks activities and I was surprised at how these things that I though only certain people could do, are actually available to everyone and are easy and simple to use as well.

Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy

This week's topic, digital literacy, was fun for me. I had never heard the phrase the digital literacy before this class the term was new to me, however I have always been somewhat tech savvy. I have not explored very many programs however, as far as creating media. I thought the videos were really interesting especially the three little pigs video. It was really cool the way that they took a classic old story and put a new twist on it, as well as used new digital literacy to make the video very interesting. The way that the photos, videos, and text overlapped each other made the video seem complex, a lot like the story line; solving the crime of the houses being blown down. Whenever I have seen media like this, I always notice that these things make it look better, however I never really thought about the work that goes into it. When I took on this weeks assignment, I got a little bit of an idea, and I now know I have a lot more to learn.

My Meme

I have always loved art and photography, so digital literacy is a cool way to bring those together. That is why this weeks assignment was fun for me because I got to find a good picture and design with it whatever message that I wanted. When I first started the project, I did not think it was going to be very difficult because I like to edit my photos a lot. However, I had a hard time trying to figure what I wanted to make a meme of, and my original idea actually gave me some trouble. I wanted to overlap photos and it took me a while and I had to try a couple different programs. When I eventually figured out how to do it using the program fotor, I changed my mind about what I wanted to do. So in the end I ended up using Picmonkey. I thought that it was a really good program for beginners because it was really simple, however you can't download your finished product without paying after a week. I also checked out pixlr and I thought that it looked like an awesome photo editor, however it was a little complicated for me to start out on. I chose to do this meme because it is a really big debate right now with everything going on with other countries. I found the image on google images, but I used the usage rights tool to find an image for uncommercial use with modification. I played around with a lot of different filters, text fonts, and colors until it looked the way that I wanted it to.

Fair Use & Copyright

What I Knew

Fair Use and Copyright are very important things to understand when working with media. I always knew that we needed to sight our sources when using someone else's work for classes, but I didn't know the rules of who could use what, and for what reasons. I also did not know what Fair Use was, and I learned that Copyright is the law that gives the owner control over their work for a certain amount of time, and Fair Use is sort of an exception to that law that says people can use it in certain circumstances. 

What I Discovered

I wondered if you had to do something in order to get a copyright, but Purdue's website answered that question when it said that a work becomes copyrighted when it is written or recorded. Fair Use, I had never heard of before, but I have been using all through school when I used media off of the internet for school projects. Through the readings I discovered that there are a number of factors that can make it possible to use part of someone else's work without asking permission. It depends on the purpose that you are using it for, the nature of the original work, how much of the work you are using, how important the part you are using is, if it will effect the work's market, and lastly if it is transformative. Transformative means that it is being used in a new way that is different from its original use. 

Why it is Useful

Things like school projects or educational presentations are examples of uses that are covered under Fair use. Even though Fair use let's you use people's work without asking, you may still have to site the source that you got it from so that you are giving them credit for their work. There are a lot of resources out there to help find media that you are able to reuse and even modify. 

Examples

I found this picture on Google but I used the advanced search options to find pictures labeled for uncommercial reuse with modification, and the original source of the picture was Wikimedia. I think that this is a good way to find usable pictures because it gives you a lot to choose from, where some of the other options give you less to choose from.

This photo I found using iStock which is a website that has images that are free to use. I found this website on the article that we were assigned, "The Ultimate Guide to Finding Free Legal Images Online". I thought that it gave me a lot of really good pictures to choose from so it was great in that aspect, however the iStock watermark is across all of them. I chose both of these photos because sunsets and dogs are two of my favorite things!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maui_-_Sunset.jpg

http://www.istockphoto.com

https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/basics.html#1

Multimedia

What is Multimedia

From what I know about multimedia so far, I understand that it uses more than one type of media such as picture, sound, text, video, and sometime animation however that is disputed. This could range from text and photo, to text and video, to text video and sound, and so on.

Where is it Used

Multimedia is used a lot in commercials on television, for training employees, teaching children, or even raising awareness for situations like the storms in Texas and Florida. Business use it in advertising, teachers in their presentations, and people everywhere are using multimedia to communicate ideas to people in a way that will catch their eye and is a lot more interesting to watch. Today, technology is an extremely important part of life, especially in communicating with others, and multimedia lets us communicate better across technology. If we were only able to send text for example, you would not be able to communicate emotion or show the other person or people what you are talking about. If you could only send a photo, the recipient would have no explanation. While there is a time a place for texting and sending photos, it is not always an effective way of communicating, so multimedia makes it possible to get the entire message across.

Web Apps

I was not clear on what a web app was, or more so what wouldn't be a web app. The article "What is a Web App?" said that it was an app that used a web browser to complete a task over a network. However, if even just informing you on a certain subject is a task, then it seems like there wouldn't be much that wasn't a web app. So my understanding is that any app that you are using online for a purpose is a web app. These are useful for everyone, as we all use the in our everyday lives. All of Google's apps that a lot of people for school and work are web apps, but also businesses create websites where you can purchase goods, contact the business, and many other things which is a great way to expand a customer base.

Example: New York Times

The New York Times website is an example of a web app because it provides people with news and weather that they want to know about. The website has an example of multimedia with the video of hurricane Irma that includes video clips of the storm, a news anchor talking, and the words that the news anchor was saying in text to make it easier to understand.
https://nyti.ms/2xUxZzr