Collaborative Research Project Wrap Up

4/26/2012

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This project definitely opened my eyes to a lot of different things.  One thing was that interviews are not as easy to conduct as them seem to be.  It seemed to take forever and ever and ever to actually find an adult who would allow me to voice record them.  Who would have known it would have been so difficult but once I did find them I found a lot of them.  There was a total of five interviews that I conducted: my dad, my sister and cousin, a butcher, a steer raiser, and a goat raiser.  As an interviewer I thought that the adults would have provided more feedback to the questions at hand, I was surprised.  The twelve and thirteen year old children answered the questions a lot better then the adults.

Another difficulty that I had was that with technology.  For this project I purchased a Kodak Playsport camcorder to conduct the interviews with.  The first interview I ended up redoing due to technical issues with the camera. (I never played with it to get a feeling of it before the interview.)  Then we had take those videos and upload them to my MacBook in order to edit them.  We couldn't figure out how to drag the clips into the timeline.  I couldn't figure out how to edit the video clips.  It took multiple Google searches to find a video that showed me how to complete the task.  The video then had to be uploaded to YouTube in order to insert it into Weebly.  Of course that wasn't an easy task.  Apparently YouTube doesn't allow videos over fifteen minutes to be uploaded.  So I had to break the videos into two.  Then they went into Weebly without any problems.

This project was definitely a stressful one from start to finish.  Thankfully I can breathe and I feel that our final product is a great one!
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Technology and the Twitterive

3/2/2012

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Within the construction of my Twitterive I have become faced using multiple different modes of technology.  Some of the modes were a struggle to understand and some were simple to being with then became frustrating.  So far in this project I have used Weebly, iMovie, YouTube, BeFunky, and Microsoft Word.

The first mode of technology I had to face was learning how to work Weebly, which I am still not fully comfortable with.  At first I was completely overwhelmed trying to learn how to create the pages and all of the little details that needed to be added to make the website look professional.  I am slowly becoming more comfortable as I continue to work more and more on my Twitterive.

The next mode of technology I used was iMovie on my MacBook.  I have used this program before and the first time it defiantly went smoother then it did this time.  I grew frustrated multiple times in the three hour process that I went through trying to make a six minute movie.  At first everything went smooth then I tried to add multiple songs and everything went downhill.  Growing frustrated I walked away from the computer screen and then would come back and fix all of the mistakes that I had made.  I actually felt as though I almost gave up on the video and just finished it as fast as I could.

Youtube was the next mode I used in order to upload the movie I had made into the Twitterive.  The one problem that I had with YouTube was the long, drug out downloading process.  I think it took about a hour for the video to fully download into YouTube.  Besides that the process wasn't completely intolerable.

Another mode of technology I used was BeFunky.  This is a photo editor that I used to edit a boring photo of the castle in Magic Kingdom.  The process of using this program was completely seamless.  Everything was easy to access and easy to understand.  I will definitely use this program in the future.

For the last couple of pieces that I created for my Twitterive were created in Microsoft Word.  I took pictures off the internet and used text boxes to incorporate the text that I wanted to include with all of the photos.  The only thing that irritated me about this was that I could never line up the words from the photo and the words from the text I created.  They always looked slanted.  But after playing around with them for a little while they kind of lined up the way I wanted them too.

Creating this Twitterive has definitely forced me to face multiple modes of technology I had never used before.  It forced me to step out of my comfort zone with the technology in order to create the pieces that I felt would help enhance my project. Overall even though some of them frustrated me I am glad that I used all of the different programs that I did.
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