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.