Question 4 Part 1

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

It would have been impossible not to use a wide variety of new media technologies in order to complete any stage of the project. With the arrival of the internet and it's easy accessibility, most notably the development of 2.0 technologies, finding and utilising helpful recources has become much easier. Luckily, my generation have been born quite snugly into the timezone of development and so these technologies are not only widely accessable but in many cases we actively already use them.

Smartphones are one of the most useful tools in this situation as they are veritable hives of 2.0 technology, i.e. the abilty to not only recieve information and content but also to give back.

During the planning stage I used various sites such as Google, YouTube, Blogger and Facebook. All of these apps were already ones I'd downloaded onto my iphone (google in the form of google chrome) and were readily accessible. However in comparison to computer based internet usage I didn't really use them much. Blogger I used occassionally when I wanted to qucikly write out a draft post on the bus to save time but this wasn't very often. The Facebook app however was a lot mre useful in that discussions with focus groups could be accessed anywhere, meaning 'virtual meetups' could be acheived when meeting for real couldn't. Yet despite Facebook's push notification feature that alerts app users when they have a message,I wasn't really able to ralleigh much of any discussion in regards to audience focus group research. This is most likely because of the disadvantage that virtual conversations pose in that ther is no sense of immediacy or obligation to reply. If however we had been able to meet face to face, a response would a seemingly forced prospect.

Where these technologies really began to bloom was during the planning stages and onwards. In planning, very early on twitter gave me the means to casually attempt to contact Paramore's lead singer Hayley Williams for permission but due to her vast amount of followers that message, it was unlikely that I would get a reply.
But towards more legitimate planning, TimeToast became a very powerful asset. Having the ability to create free timelines was extremely useful for organisation as it gave clear, time pointed goals that could easily be edited and equally as easily embedded into blogger posts through redily copyable HTML codes.

PowToon was also a website that proved useful in presenting my plans, especially when the largely favoured Prezi persisted in simply just not loading. PowToon also was free and provided a simple interface for creating presentations although the time limitations were something that proved a little awkward to get around at first, but did not affect the end result.
Looking at the almost obvious bigger picture, Blogger is an essential tool for planning as well as the other 3 processes. There's a reason we all use it and it's down to the fact that it gives total editing freedom in terms with when changes can be made as well as allowing a seriously wide variety of content to be displayed through the ability to incorporate HTML, esssential computer code. Without Blogger or programmes like it, we would probably be forced to rely on a majorly text based catalogue of our progression with long winded descriptions of what we did rather than the glorious immediacy of show and tell.