Financial Accounts

Here is a list of all of our outgoings and our income.

Outgoings

500 copies from newspaperclub £500 inc VAT

postage for first three orders £11.40

Total: £511.40

Income

advert Junction £350
advert Lincoln   £100
advert OCR £100
 
Reigate 120 copies £60
Islington 40 copies  £20
Netherhall  30 copies £15
Guernsey Grammer 20 copies £10

Total: £645

We had made a profit of £133.60.

I think this is a very good turn out and I am very impressed with this project. We are currently
still getting orders for more copies of the newspaper, this is going to help a lot of students with
their A level Media exam including all of us.

Feedback

Here is some feedback that we had received about our newspaper, this piece of feedback is from Mary Berrisford, Islington Sixth Form :

“We've just put the underground map on the wall and are fighting about who is on the coolest line (that's teachers not students by the way!) Initial reaction is that we can't wait to use it in the classroom - could be a few more bigger images in there... We'll use it with students next week (weds) and email you some more feedback”

This next piece is from Jenny Grahame:

“MediaMe looks great.  Works really well with the colour, etc. Mega
achievement.”

Having received this feedback, it made me feel like I and the rest of the class had achieved
something really worthwhile and it made me feel appreciated.

Project Evaluation - How well does it meet your original intentions?

I didn't really know what to expect as we first started the project,afterbeing told we were going to create a revision guide in the form of a newspaper I assumed that this would be like any other student attempt at forming a newspaper. I expected it to be made of normal paper and to be printed from average user printers.

Infact this was the opposite, what we had was a great quality newspaper something like you would expect to go out and buy in the shops. The look, the feel and even the smell was just like that of a newspaper, we did have it printed out in a newspaper print factory that is something I really was not expecting.


Like all of our other projects I expected us all to leave everything until the last moment and that be were our project fails. But instead the whole group pulled it's finger out and brought together a nice piece of work.

Project Evaluation - How Does It Look

I was very impressed by the asthetics of our newspaper, it looks nothing like a paper done by a bunch of students infact it looks really professional but this was our intention anyway but I never believed it was going to look this good. I think that the fact we all sat down and sorted out a stylesheet for how the articles were going to be written out and that we all sat together in class to decide the layout of the paper really helped on making this look how it is.

We tried to make use of the fact we have full colour printing, we didn't use as much as I would have liked us to but I still think it will be visually please to our target audience which is students. Not every student wants to look at big chunks of text, so that is why we increased the font size and added colour. I think with the way it looks we have succeeded in our goal.

Project Evaluation - How Pleased Are You With Your Contributions?

Overall I think I participated quite well in this project, my job was to write an article for the newspaper. I had written an article for the newspaper on gaming and how throughout the evolution of the internet what changes have been made and future possibilities.
Once we had written our articles, our teacher Nick came round and put a file on our laptops which then opened up. This was the template for which our articles would be placed in, we would copy our articles into it and alter each font specific to the styles sheet.

Mine took up two and a half of the 3 columns that were available on each page, after this we printed them all of and stuck them up on the wall. We realised that we had too many articles to fit into our newspaper, some of us had to combine our articles together to take up less space. Considering me and Dave where both writing about games in one way or another we decided to team up and do an article together.

Another role I played in was helping out in setting the guidlines for the newspaper styles. Each of the groups created a newspaper layout and put an article in it, the next day me, James and Hayden loked at these layouts and discussed what worked rather well and what didn't. We then gave this feedback back to the class, this aided in the process of the develpoment of our newspaper's visual aspects.

Project Evaluation - How effectively did you work in your role and others in theirs?

I feel that I worked as well as I could have done in my role as a write, I met all the deadlines for the articles and I had produced a nice finished product. I worked well within my group and took on board any feedback given to me.
I found that trying to transfer my knowledge of my chosen subject onto paper a little difficult, as trying to use terminilogy that everyone could use and understand.

Everyone stuck to the roles they had been assigned with, i think the group leaders did a great job of keeping their teams in order and I especially think that the quality control team did a great job in keeping the whole project together. Mike did great in giving us feedback on our work, Alex did great with liasing with clients and getting adverts, Kirk did great with keeping us all on schedule and Tara did a good job on providing us all with enough evidence.

Project Evaluation - What could be learned from this experience?

A newspaper project is a completly different form of media that we havn't stepped into yet during this project, and I see it as a good chance to be able broaden our knowledge in media and gain some experiance. Haven proven that we are able to create a newspaper at a good enough quality to sell shows that we are a very capable bunch of students especially when keeping to a deadline.
Also as we are taking the A2 Media exam ourselves, producing the articles for this newspaper has given us the opportunity to be revising/gaining knowledge for the exam. This project has worked in more way than one for us, given us some knowledge in preperation for our exam, given us the ability to create a commercialy viable product and sell it on and also gave us some skills to be able to work in a big group together.

Project Evaluation - What has been learnt from this experience?

I don't normally like written tasks, I try to steer away from essays and such. But I enjoyed this and it proved to me that aslong as you make it your own and it is about sometihng you are interested in, it can be fun to try and teach people some new information.
Our class has really developed from the start of the course, we woulnd't have been able to pull off a project like this at the start of the course. We didn't have the communication sills between ourselves to sufficiently meet deadlines or communicate about what needs doing. These are skills that we used in the project and indeed learnt from this project that will get us very far in future life.

Wednesday 31st

Today our teacher had put all of our articles onto the board along with the front cover, activities page and the adverts page.

He then gave us a piece of paper per group and told us to set out an order for what the pages should be in the newspaper. We decided in our group to do it on how important or relevant each article is.

After we had all done it, James was first up to arrange the articles

Monday 29th Part 2

In the next lesson me and Dave started to add some images to the article, we added a blue background to the article, a map of the area that Playstation Network is available, and image from Second Life and the logo for facepunch.

We the colours of the background and the image worked together really nicely, we text wrapped the images to make the whole article flow.

Monday 29th Part 1

Today we had a discussion with our teacher Pete about all of the content that is going into our newspaper, we thought about what needs to be done to some of our articles to make them seem like they are fit for the purpose of a revision guide.

We had the idea of trying to create a model answer to an exam question, the trouble with this is the question is alternated in five different ways so then we would need to do five which we do not have the room for. So then we could put a link in the newspaper to a website where we could have all the model answers.

Me and Dave had decided to join forces and combine our articles into one, we took the best bits and the most relevant bits we had and put it into the template. We managed to keep it down to 1 page.

Control Group's Decision

After realising we have too many article to be put into our newspaper, the qulity control groups decided to get the writers to either colaborate with others to make one article or cut their article down. Me and Dave joined forces to work together because we were both working on game development and communities. I am happy with this choice and believe me and Dave can knock up a good article for the newspaper.

Friday 26th

Today in class we put each of our articles into the article template that nick had made for us. This was to try and get a rough idea of how our articles would look when it came to printing. After we had put them into the template and set up all the right fonts we put them all up on a wall to have a look at them all and see if we were heading in the right direction. It turned out that we have too many pages of articles for our newspaper, we also realised that that number would increase once we get images in the articles. Some of us need to cut our articles down, and some of us need to try and incoprorate ours with other peoples.

Kirk from the control group came over and spoke to me and suggested that I talk with Dave about merging ours together, as Dave is talking about online gaming communities and I am talking about the development of games and mvoies with the internet.

Styles Template

Today our teacher Nick handed round a file for us to put on our laptops, this file consisted of a template in which we would put our article in. Once we had done it we had to format our article so that it was set to the standard of the styles sheet. Doing this gave us all a good idea on how much space our articles would take up, mine took up around 2 and a half columns. After this we had printed them all out and put them on the board. We counted how many pages these articles would take up, and it appeared we had more than we could fit in.

This is a screengrab of the styles application that we used to reformat our article.

Thursday 25th

Today in our teams we had a copy of each newspaper template that our groups had designed he day before, we then annotated them and said what we liked about them and what we didn't like.

After this one person from each team then joined up and spoke about the templates. This consisted of me, Hayden and James, we criticised each template formally and spoke about what is needed for a god template and how it should look.

Here are the features that we didn't like about the current templates:

• The font that has been used was too boring
• Some didn't have header or footers
• The text wrapping didn't work so well in one of them it needs to be tighter.
• Things like pull outs and crossheads need to be set out nicer

We only had one lesson to go through this so we rushed through it to get it done

Style Sheet

Today in our teams we were giving all the templates for the newspaper that we had created yesterday, we had to annotate each one and say what we liked about them and what we didn't like about them. After we had done this one person from each group gathered together, this included me, Hayden and James. Once we had joined together we discussed our opinions on each template and what we could do about any improvements needed.

Tuesday 23rd Questionnaire day

Today we started at colleridge istead of Long Road, we ere asked to come in to the year 12's class and ask them questions about our certain topics we chose to ask about game communities and wikipedia. Our group of four split up into to. Sam and Matt questioned the people on one half of the room whilst me and Tim asked the other half, tim seemed abit skeptical about this task but we plowed through with it anyway.

Once we had finished we then joined up together to collate our data, the objective was to gather both qualitative data and quantitative data and try and see if we can incorporate this into generating a useful resource guide.

Dave's Points

Today Dave came in to help us with our style sheet for out newspaper, he drew out a simple layout of a magazine on the board and he talked us through everything labeled on the design.

Here are the notes that I had taken:

As we are starting from scratch we need to make sure it is different and not the same as every other magazine or newspaper but we need to keep it consistant throughout. For certain parts of the style sheet like the captions or the titles or the main body text it needs to be different fonts but not too varied. SO maybe change teh font sizes or colour or even if it is in bold, italic or not. Some magazines start their articles having the first paragraph in bold, normally this is the intro. You will notice that in a lot of magazines they use pullout quotes, this is where a small section of the article (that is interesting) is pulled out onto the side of the magazine , this is used to catch the readers attention give them a littel taste of what is to come.
A boxout is a small bock on the page that has information that is to do with the article but not directly relevant.

We need to figure out whats fonts we are going to use and set out our positioning of everything, such as pictures, body text, box outs and pullouts..

Action Plan Starting 22nd March Monday

Monday: Each of the 4 groups has to create a style sheet for the newspaper. A style sheet is like a plan that you will fill in on how you are going to keep the newspaper consistent (i.e fonts etc).

Think up some questions to ask the level 12's tomorrow on their online usage.

Tuesday: This is the day that we will be questioning the level 12 group at coleridge about their internet usage.

Wednesday:

First Article Draft

Here is the first draft to my article on gaming. It isn't finished yet, but after recieving feedback from people in my class I can reiterate it and make neccesary changes for the next draft.

Job Roles

Here is the list of the people in the control group:

Liason: Alex
Reflection Manager: Mike
Evidence: Tara
Schedule: Kirk

I think that these are a good choice of people to have in our control group, Tara seems to be pretty good at written work and to have her working on the evidence is a great idea. Kirk is very good with organising so he fits the schedule manager role very well. Alex is a people person so being the liason is very fitting for his personality and abilities. Mike is good at giving feedback and criticsing and will be able to give you good advice on what needs to be done.


Blue Team:

Philippa (Leader)
Ali
James

Red Team:

Laurence (Leader)
Matt H
Dave
Hayden

Gold Team:

Sam (Leader)
Me
Matt L
Tim

I think these are pretty good groups, everybody is set out with people who they will work well with and very productivly. I think that this task will be a success.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog for the Extended Project. The project itself is half an as level part of the diploma. We are to work as a class in producing a newspaper in the style of a revision guide, which will hopefully be used by A2 media students across the country taking the media in the online age exam.

The class is going to be split into 4 groups, there are 3 article writing groups which are called: blue team, gold team and red team. The fourth group is called the quality control group they consist of the following:

The Liason

The Schedule Manager

The Evidence Manager

The Reflection Manager

Each of the worker groups have 3 workers and a leader each. The leader with affiliate with the control group and report on ideas and progress.