24th March -Sessions Work

Today we have worked on producing some ideas for the style of the newspaper, sketching them down and then giving a template to quality control. Within our group we gathered the ideas we each had for what style we thought each page should look like and then sketched them out on a A3 piece of paper. This was then used as an idea sheet to refer to when producing the template on pages. We used the content of James' article to put within the template and used his article and images as the preview of what a page would look like.

Once we had completed this template, we transferred it to a memory stick to print off in A3 and then to give to quality control. We have had a bit of confusion with what content was needed to be put in this template, as we first used James' article content but we needed to use Tara's content This needed to be altered so James altered this and then sent it to quality control to print in A3.

Myself and Alie then completed another template, which shows more of the boxs, fonts and sizes that we would use, sketched this out and then printed off three copies of this for our group and quality control.

Questionnaire for Students

Today we made some questionnaire for some students which we thought would help us in our process for making the newspaper. We needed opinions from students who would be reading the newspaper, to what they thought the newspaper should be like and what would help them to revise. As a lot of the articles are based around the internet and how we use the internet on a daily basis, we thought that we would ask them some questions based on how they use the internet and how often they use it. Here are the questions we asked, the answers we received and the results.

When did you last access the internet?

yesterday

last night (yesterday)

last night (yesterday)

last night (yesterday)

40 minutes ago (today)

this morning (today)

this morning (today)

this morning (today)

10 minutes ago (today)

10 minutes ago (today)

yesterday

today

yesterday

this morning (today)

last night (yesterday)

Result; 7 today, 8 yesterday

What did you do when you were online?

updated twitter and facebook

played online ‘call of duty’

updated facebook

downloaded music (illegally)

searched wikipedia

checked facebook

checked facebook

checked bank details

went on facebook

facebook

facebook

downloaded music (illegally)

google account / blogging / youtube

facebook

hotmail (email)

Result; 8 - social networking, 2 - downloading, 1 - gaming, 3 - research/work, 1 - email

Which website did you last visit? Why?

facebook - check notifications

facebook - check notifications

HSBC - check if paid

facebook - chatted on facebook chat

facebook - update status

facebook - chatted using facebook chat

youtube - check subscription

facebook - see what people were doing

facebook - facebook chat

google - find songs to download

wikipedia - research what SONY stoud for

facebook - check up and baet score on tetris

facebook - talk to people on facebook chat

hotmail - checking mail

wikipedia - information on twilight

Result; 9 - facebook, 1 - HSBC, 1 - google, 1 - youtube, 2 - wikipedia, 1 - hotmail

When was the last time you used a research website? Which one was it? What did you research?

month ago (wikipedia) - an artist for college

a few weeks ago (wikipedia) - record label for college

month ago (wikipedia) - project related

last week (wikipedia) - new media for college

40 minutes ago (wikipedia) - searched SONY

today (wikipedia) - twilight

research in books

two weeks ago (wikipedia) - tracklist for CD

doesn’t remember

yesterday (wikipedia) - elite status

a few weeks ago (wikipedia) - music industry

last year (wikipedia) - pandas

last thursday (wikipedia) - music genres

last month (wikipedia) - music videos

last month (wikipedia) - digi-packs

Result; 4 - month ago, 2 - a few weeks ago, 1 - two weeks ago, 2 - last week, 2 - today, 1 - last year, 1 - doesn’t remember, 1 - yesterday, 1 - research in books

Do you use other regular research websites?

not really - just wikipedia

just wikipedia

just wikipedia

just wikipedia

just wikipedia

just wikipedia / also use google

wikipedia / imdb

wikipedia / imdb

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia / also use google

just wikipedia

Results; 6 - just wikipedia, 7 - just wikipedia / also use google, 2 - wikipedia / imdb

Do you have a social networking site?

facebook / myspace (hardy use) / twitter / bebo (never use)

facebook / myspace (hardy use) / twitter / bebo (never use)

facebook

facebook / bebo (never use)

facebook

facebook

facebook

facebook

facebook / myspace (don’t use it)

don’t have a social networking site

facebook

facebook

facebook

facebook

facebook / myspace

Results; 11 - facebook, 1 - facebook and myspace (uses both), 2 - facebook and twitter, 1 - doesn’t have a social netowrking site

How often do your update you FB status?

twice a week

3 times a week

3 times a week

don’t update

once a day

barely update

barely update

twice a week

everyday

3 times a day

5 times a day

once a day

once a day

never has

hardly does (but did yesterday)

Results; 4 - once a day, 1 - 5 times a day, 1 - 3 times a day, 2 - 3 times a week, 2 - twice a week, 3 - don’t update, 2 - barely update

Have you uploaded videos online? How old were you when you first did?

yes / 15

yes / 16

yes / 16

yes / 16 (didn’t before course)

no

yes / 16

yes / 16

yes / 12

yes / 14

yes / 16 (didn’t before course)

yes / 16 (didn’t before course)

yes / 16 (vimeo)

yes / 16 (vimeo)

yes / 12

yes / 16

Results; 14 - yes, 1 - no

Example of a Possible Style Layout for Newspaper

Today we have been given a double page spread article which was called 'the ocr a2 critical perspectives in media exam'. We then look over this article and annotated it to show how it was laid out and what styles they used to present it.

Below is an image of the article that I annotated and also how I thought they laid out this article.

The first thing I noticed was that they used a simple but bold font as the title of the article which was situated so it is the first thing that you see. It is not clear from the image, but they also used a mathematical background to relate to the content of the text. Under the title they have used a subtitle which is in a slightly different font but is as simple and is in a slightly smaller case. Then throughout the article they have used this same font as the subtitle, for the headings for each section of the article. For the important name in the first paragraph they have used a bolder text so that it stands out as important information and they have also done the same thing at the end of the article and used a box around the author of the article.

Plan for the Week 22nd - 26th

Today I have created another weekly plan for this week and it contains the work that we completed today and also what we plan to do for the rest of the week. This may vary depending on what we manage to get completed.

Action Plan For Today

Today we will need to be working on making questions for a questionnaire that we will be giving to some year 12 students. These questions will help us to find more information that may help us with our articles and find out how involved students are with the online age.

We will also need to start thinking about planning a style for the newspaper, gathering some ideas and then giving them to the quality control team to look over.

Feedback From Mike on My Second Draft Article

To make sure that my article is the best it can be, I have to produce a new print out each time I make changes based on the feedback that I have been given and then get more feedback based on my updated version. I have decided to give most of my updated articles to someone in the quality control team to get my feedback.

This is feedback that Mike, from quality control, gave me;

- Texts and figures need to be added

- When did Facebook become global? expand on this

- Include a few more quotations

- What is the future of Facebook? explain this

- How has this developed with media in the online age? What change has been made to Facebook over time?

19th March - Sessions Work

Today our lessons was cut short to an hour and a half so we didn't have a lot of time to complete a lot of work that we wanted to get done. Barney took the first half hour of our lesson to talk to us about media in the online age and how viral music videos have effected the industry.

He gave us some questions and points that we should think about;

-Why do you watch the videos?

-Is it to pass time or do you connect with the music?

-Viral model = Does it democratise the process? Can youtube allow artists to hijack the system?

-Traditional model = Music and video had a symbolic relationship - Iconic videos created superstars, superstars created bigger videos, e.g Thriller

However, we managed to worked on our articles today, working on the feedback that we were given from other members of the class and we then sent a PDF of our article to Alex to send off to Jenny for more feedback.

Second Draft of my Article

Has Facebook Effected The Way In Which We Socialise In Today’s Society?

Facebook is a social networking site which as been running since February 2004. It was slowly introduced along side other social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo and now it is the most popular social networking site on the internet. I think this is because it allows anyone to add anyone, have conversations with friends and use its applications to do almost anything. It is bringing many people together, you are able to search for friends and in some rare cases you end up coming across someone you haven't spoken to in years and reconnect with them.

There have been many game applications which many people use out of boredom and a few of them have become quite popular to a point where non-Facebook users have heard of the 'addictions' to the game application. For example, there is a game application called ʻFarmvilleʼ, which I think no matter how long you have been on Facebook, you have used it at some point, even if you’ve never used it since. The game basically allows you to maintain your own farm, add neighbours and make coins to buy decorations for the farm. As well as game applications, they have applications where you can fill out quizzes and post your results on your profile page for other users to see and possibly then do the same. I use quite a lot of the applications on a daily basis, however, I have started to use more of the activities available on the site such as making events and groups. Facebook has progressed over the years and you are now able to make groups that anyone can join or make an event that anyone can go to. I have played about with this a lot recently, for example, making an event to go see the film Alice in Wonderland. I must admit, it was hard to get anyone to accept to the invite as I only wanted people I knew to be there and in the end we ended up not going.

There are a lot more successful events, such as, the Cambridge Strawberry Fair, which has 1,961 confirmed guests. This is has become quite useful, as for most of us, years ago we would have to make several phone calls to make an event but with Facebook, as long as you are friends with the people you want to invite, you can make the event and it can be sorted within minutes.

However, these events can be very useful and interesting but a few of them have been known to get out of hand. As you are able to put up any information that you wish and the event can be open for the whole world to attend, some people have made the mistake of showing their house parties online. The Sun has written an article on a teenage girl who pasted her private house party Facebook, which then turned out to become out of hand and the girl was said to be unconscious throughout this whole evening. The article was called ‘Facebook party house trashed

’ and was published on the 22nd of February this year by Guy Patrick and he writes about the disasters the family came home to and shows an interview with the father. This is one extreme case of Facebook events going wrong, and unfortunately there have been a few other cases. There was a severe amount of items stolen, property damaged and they claimed to have an estimated £10,000 worth of damaged. This was all cause by a suspected fifty unexpected vandals and the owner of the house claims that he saw them ‘bragging’ on Facebook and he aims to hand them names into the police. Within the interview, her father says; “Suddenly from being a small party for her and her mates from school it turned into a riot, with men in their late twenties turning up in cabs”.

To many people, Facebook has become the site that you can't really do without. Generally I don't think I would be able to get on with my daily life without the internet. Social networking has become part of my daily routine and I think that without it, we wouldn't talk to as many people and we wouldn't know much about what is going on. As Facebook has a message board as the 'homepage', where everyoneʼs status updates appear, I tend to see a lot of what they are up to and what is going on in the world outside of my life. I'm not really the kind of person that would watch the news and if anything serious, exciting or out of the ordinary has happened recently, it is bound to be in someoneʼs status at some point. Status updates are also promoting tv programs and in some cases becoming a type of competition for them. Many members of Facebook like to discuss what they are currently watching on tv or what they enjoy to watch. These comments can sometimes effect the popularity of some shows, in both bad and good ways. Recently, a good example was the last two episodes of the fourth series of Skins which were shown on E4 on Wednesday 10th and17th of March. There seemed to be a lot of students watching this episodes while on Facebook so I decided to observe them. On the 10th of March, there was a large amount of comments stating that were upset about one of lead characters being murdered and this seemed to make a big impact on others on Facebook at the same time. There was a lot of discussion between about how upsetting the episode was but it caused a lot of interest and therefore this would be a plus for Skins. However, on the 17th of March, which was the showing of the last episode, there was a lot of viewers that were disappointed with the episode and they didn’t think that it was the best way to end the series. This may have made an impact Skins as from this they can see that they may have lost some interest from viewers and they may be encouraged to improve for the next series.

The whole idea of Facebook is changing the way we live, these days I don't think people have enough confidence to just go out somewhere and make a random friends and they would just get the small thrill of adding someone random on Facebook, who they will hardly talk to you or lives on the other side of the world. There are a large number of reasons to why this may be, to whether they just have low confidence, to whether they just have strict parents. It may just be the expectations of our elders, as I was asked by my uncle the other day as to why I was sat on Facebook on a Friday night rather than going out to get 'smashed' with my friends. When they were younger they didn't have the technology that we have today or the opportunities. There spare time was spent hanging out with their friends, a common place to hang out was down by the railway line, when my mother was my age. They would take advantage of the local pubs that would let teens hang out in the back to play pool. Sitting in each evening wasn’t really an option for them, as they didn’t have the right technology that would keep them occupied.

Today we have a lot more opportunities that don’t involve the new technology but we choose to enjoy the latest ‘gadget’. As being a student, you don’t have many financial responsibilities, paying bills or anything like that. We have more time to spare and more money than the average adult who works full time, five days a week. This gives us a large amount of opportunities to enjoy being a young adult but as you observe Facebook, you still find a large majority of young adults spending their evenings online.

The whole idea that if you have internet access you can be on Facebook whenever you want has become a profit to phone companies. Most phones now have the internet available on them, apps are also available to use and they made a very popular app for Facebook. This now means that anyone with the right technology and with the right app, can now go online wherever and whenever they want. This then brings out the unlucky few who have the 'addiction' to Facebook, who then spend most of their time with their iPhone out, updating their status on Facebook. Itʼs now very easy for people to get addicted to the internet and its sites available and now we have other ways to get to it, rather than a computer, we now spend the majority of our day glued to these sites. Ruth Bloomfield produced an article on the Mail Online

website which looked into this ‘addiction’ and how it may be ‘taking over our lives’. One line read “The UK has undoubtedly become a nation of Facebook addicts, ‘said a spokesman for market research company Mintel, which commissioned the report.” This seems to be a common thought amongst people writing articles and it shows that it is an issue that is becoming more dominant in the online age. Another line in this article reads; “More than half of adults who use sites including Facebook, Bebo and YouTube admit they spend more time online than with real friends and family.” This shows you that even though it may be an issue that is hidden under most peoples tongues, when Facebook users are asked they do agree that these sites have become an addiction to the regular users.

Feedback For Mike, Tara and Matt L

Throughout this week we have been producing our articles and giving others feedback on their drafts. I taken a version of Mike's article and also Matt and Tara's article, read through them and give them feedback. As I wasn't present in college today, I sent them all a message on facebook giving them all the feedback that I could think of that may help them to improve their articles.

Feedback From Jenny

After we had produced our first draft of each of our articles, we gave a PDF to Alex and he sent all of them to Jenny. She then replied and gave us all feedback on what she thought of our articles and how we could improve on them. Below is the email that she sent to Alex with the feedback.

"Hi Alexander

Sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you earlier – have had some problems with Acrobat Reader, mainly unprintable fonts, so could only read the articles onscreen, rather than in hard copy, which is usually the easiest way to comment. So these comments re very brief – wil give you more detailed feedback at the next stage.

A very promising start – but across the board, sone problems in the balance of information and opinion. You really need to start from thinking about the essential information your readers are going to need for the purposes of the exam (Matt and Tara start off vry well in this respect) , and resource them factually and theoretically before you launch off into your own views. To take just two examples, I think Natalie’s pece, which is very factual but well informed, gets this nearly right, although it could do with some references to theory; whereas Philippa’s aricle on Facebook is very lively and personal but needs much more factual research and detailed examples of Facebook use to support the arguments, and in particular to justify some of her remarks about Facebook ‘addiction’ - which does play a bit worryingly to the ‘moral panics’ often expressed about social networking. Similarly, James’ piece on Wikipedia needs a lot more data and theoretical references to support his personal views – and he needs to unpick his section about ‘How ‘true’ is Wikipedia’, in which he makes some fairly general assumptions. Across the range of the pieces, I think you’re covering interesting stuff and have got lots of good ideas, but often there’s too much padding and not enough planning to incorporate more critical and theoretical issues.

Have to rush, but will feed back more at the next draft. Do think about planning, though – sometimes its really helpful to incorporate web references and exampoles into your initial planning from the very start. The use of real-life examples, with weblinks and acknowledged quotes, is what will make these pieces really useful to readers.

Hope this helps – although it’s very genral. Get back to me if you want me to offer more detailed advice at this stage.

Keep up the good work!

Jenny"

Draft of My Article

Has Facebook Affected The Way In Which We Socialise In Todayʼs Society?

Facebook is a social networking site. It was slowly introduced along side other social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo and now it is the most popular social networking site on the internet. I think this is because it allows anyone to add anyone, have conversations with friends and use its applications to do almost anything. It is bringing many people together, you are able to search for friends and in some rare cases you end up coming across someone you haven't spoken to in years and reconnect with them.

There have been many game applications which many people use out of boredom and a few of them have become quite popular to a point where non-Facebook users have heard of the 'addictions' to the game application. For example, there is a game application called ʻFarmvilleʼ, which I think no matter how long you have been on Facebook, you have used it at some point, even if you’ve never used it since. The game basically allows you to maintain your own farm, add neighbours and make coins to buy decorations for the farm. As well as game applications, they have applications where you can fill out quizzes and post your results on your profile page for other users to see and possibly then do the same. I use quite a lot of the applications on a daily basis, however, I have started to use more of the activities available on the site such as making events and groups. Facebook has progressed over the years and you are now able to make groups that anyone can join or make an event that anyone can go to. I have played about with this a lot recently, for example, making an event to go see the film Alice in Wonderland. I must admit, it was hard to get anyone to accept to the invite as I only wanted people I knew to be there and in the end we ended up not going.

There are a lot more successful events, such as, the Cambridge Strawberry Fair, which has 1,961 confirmed guests. This is has become quite useful, as for most of us, years ago we would have to make several phone calls to make an event but with Facebook, as long as you are friends with the people you want to invite, you can make the event and it can be sorted within minutes.

However, these events can be very useful and interesting but a few of them have been known not to work very well. As you are able to put up any information that you wish and the event can be open for anyone to attend, some people have made the mistake of showing their house parties online. The Sun has written an article on a teenage girl who pasted her private house party Facebook, which then turned out to become out of hand and the girl was said to be unconscious throughout this whole evening. This is one extreme case of Facebook events going wrong, and unfortunately there have been a few other cases. There was a severe amount of items stolen, property damaged and they claimed to have a estimated £10,000 worth of damaged. This was all cause by a suspected fifty unexpected vandals and the owner of the house claims that he saw them ‘bragging’ on Facebook and he aims to hand them names into the police.

To many people, Facebook has become the site that you can't really do without. Generally I don't think I would be able to get on with my daily life without the internet. Social networking has become part of my daily routine and I think that without it, we wouldn't talk to as many people and we wouldn't know much about what is going on. As Facebook has a message board as the 'homepage', where everyoneʼs status updates appear, I tend to see a lot of what they are up to and what is going on in the world outside of my life. I'm not really the kind of person that would watch the news and if anything serious, exciting or out of the ordinary has happened recently, it is bound to be in someoneʼs status at some point.

The whole idea of Facebook is changing the way we live, these days I don't think people have enough confidence to just go out somewhere and make a random friends and they would just get the small thrill of adding someone random on Facebook, who they will hardly talk to you or lives on the other side of the world. There are a large number of reasons to why this may be, to whether they just have low confidence, to whether they just have strict parents. It may just be the expectations of our elders, as I was asked by my uncle the other day as to why I was sat on Facebook on a Friday night rather than going out to get 'smashed' with my friends. When they were younger they didn't have the technology that we have today or the opportunities. There spare time was spent hanging out with their friends, a common place to hang out was down by the railway line, when my mother was my age. They would take advantage of the local pubs that would let teens hang out in the back to play pool. Sitting in each evening wasn’t really an option for them, as they didn’t have the right technology that would keep them occupied.

Today we have a lot more opportunities that don’t involved the new technology but we chose to enjoy the latest ‘gadget’.

As being a student, you don’t have many financial responsibilities, paying bills or anything like that. We have more time to spare and more money than the average adult who works full time, five days a week. This gives us a large amount opportunities to enjoy being a young adult but as you observe Facebook, you still find a large majority of the young adult population spending there evenings online.

The whole idea that if you have internet access you can be on Facebook whenever you want has become a profit to phone companies. Most phones now have the internet available on them, apps are also available to use and they made, a now common, app for Facebook. This now means that anyone with the right technology and with the app, can now go online wherever and whenever they want. For the unlucky few who have the 'addiction' to Facebook, who then spend most of their time with their iPhone out, updating their status on Facebook. Itʼs now very easy for people to get addicted to the internet and its sites available and now we have other ways to get to it, rather than a computer, we now spend the majority of our day glued to these sites.

Action Plan 15th - 17th

I have decided to write an action plan to show what I need to have done by Wednesday this week generally and also some specific tasks that I need to complete within my role.

By Wednesday I need to;

- Print off two articles are I think may help with my article and relate to what I am writing. I will also need to read through them and annotate them.

- Continue with correcting my article based on the feedback that was given to me by the quality control team and also other members of the class and make sure that I refer to the articles that I have printed off, including other sources that are relevant.

- Printing off two copies of my article.

Within My Role I Will Need To;

- Make sure that my team get their articles edited and printed by wednesday.

- That they complete the other tasks set.

- That james works on his infographic and alie works on her plan of her article.

Plan For Week 8th - 12th March

For the week the 8th to the 12th I have planned what I will need to be doing for this project and what I have then completed. i have decided to show this in a table so I went on to pages and produced and filled out a table to display the information.

Feedback From Mike on My Draft Article

Mike, part of the quality control team, has read through my article draft and given me some feedback. Below are the images of the feedback that he gave me and I have also written down the key points that he wanted me to fix.

"-Don't talk about the Strawberry Fair as this would only appeal to people in Cambridge, choose somethnig that would be more wide appeal - perhaps a festival, Glastonbury or V.

- Talk about the down sides of Facebook events, talk about the house party that over 100 people turned up to and the house got ruined - research into this.

- When you talk about people not having the confidence to go out and meet new people, suggest why?; - possibly bullied?, strict parenting or low self-confidence?

- Sometimes online, they speak to random people they will never meet for reasons;

- you can be who you want to be online, argue the point that it is actually a way of making new friends if they don;t have the confidence to meet them in person - maybe a better way online.

- Why do you enjoy sitting in on a friday night? what are the reasons behind this?

-no money, no one to go out with?, lack of motivation?, transport issues?

- What did the older generation do in their time?"

Risk Assessment

As we are planning on producing a newspaper there isn't any risks that would affect us throughout the project. We will not be part of the actual making of the newspaper within the factory so the only risks to us would be within college, producing the content for the newspaper.
We have to be careful of the general risks which would involve damaging any equipment, tripping over wires and excessive use of a computer my harm someones eyes.

Buget and Funding

This is quite a different project for us in a lot of different ways but one is that we actually have a budget that we have to stick to for this project. To have our newspaper produced and printed out in 500 copies it will cost us £500. This the only money that we will need to spend throughout this project as we are given all the equipment that we need to use by the college. This includes items such as laptop, printer, paper and pens.

As we aren't going to just be given £500, we need to find someone or some companies who may interested in helping funding us for this project and might also be interesting in the product that we are producing. We will be having a meeting with the quality control team and the liaison soon that we can come up with some possible ideas for who we may want to contact to help us with this and see how much we would want to ask each other them for.

Kirk's(schedule leader) Task

Today our schedule leader has asked each group to complete a task, which would help us with researching and coming up with ideas for a flyer. The task was to take a big piece of paper, situate 'Ideas for Flyer' in the middle and expand out our idea in detail. Our group worked together to gather some ideas and we wrote them on this piece of paper. Below is an image that Alie took of the piece of paper and below that I have written out the ideas that were wrote on the piece of paper.

'Name of paper at the front and logo(if we have one), MEdia

Number of pages paper has

Target audience for the paper - A2 students

Explain the intentions of the paper - to help students further their understanding of media for the exam

Include content about the newspaper is for, e.g to help on the A2 exam

How the paper will helps students, e.g further education, revision, research and further understanding

Brief summary of articles and activities that will be in paper. "It will include useful info on researching for the exam and articles about practitioners which will be useful"

Colourful and vibrant so it stands out and make it appeal to the audience

A possible tagline such as - 'pass now' or something not quite as 'corny' - "get ready to pass"

Explain who is designing it. A2 students making it for A2 students

Sponsors on flyer(if we manage to get some), if we get sponsorship explain who is and include a logo, possibly at the back

Include images of content and pictures of us making it'

James has also briefly designed a small layout of the flyer at the bottom left corner of the diagram so I took a picture so it is clearer to see. It shows the rough outline of what the flyer would look if you applied all these points.

12th March - Sessions Work

First of all today, Barney took our first lesson and talked to us about all of articles that we are making and helped us with improving them and seeing who may be able to help us. He showed us that we could link some of our articles together, not in a sense where we join them but to talk to others and sharing some ideas between each other. It helped me a lot because it showed me a lot more that I could put into my article, I didn't have to just talk about the social networking but also link in how tv shows are effected. For example, someone could put a status up on Facebook mentioning what was on tv and how they felt and then it could effect someone who may be waiting to watch it on 'Catch up tv'. There gives me another subject to add, where Matt L and Tara are making an article on this topic.

We have all been working on finishing our first drafts of our articles today, printing off copies to give to quality control and a PDF to send to Jenny graham. My role as leader of the group also had to be shown today, to motivate my team to complete the work needed and make sure that they meet the deadlines that were given to us.

11th March - Session Work

Today we have received some exam results so we did spend a lot of our session today talking about what the results mean etc. Once we were finished with this, we worked on our articles and hopefully printing off a draft for someone in the group to look over and give feedback. I have managed to print off a draft and I have given it to the quality control team to read over and hopefully give me some feedback. This will help me a lot, as tomorrow is the draft deadline, I will be able to work on it a lot more tomorrow and improve it more before it gets sent off. The other two members of my group have not completed their drafts, but spent the lesson working on them and they will make the deadline for tomorrow.

Images of the Articles That I Researched and Went Through

10th March - Sessions Work

Today we weren't in our normal room, so we had no access to our laptops or the internet. This made the session a bit harder to do something productive but in each of our groups we found some productive tasks to be getting on with. I thought that it would be best to see how my group was getting on with their article and now that they were almost finished with annotating other articles, they needed another task to be getting on with. We were able to get to some resources within this room, so I got two big pieces of paper and I asked them to plan out what they want to do within their article. I wanted them to place their title in the middle, use it as a mind map and expand the article into each section they want to talk about so they then know exactly what they want to write.

This started off as a good task but they seemed to find it easier to make bullet points and then expand those bullet points to describe what they are going to write.

9th March - Sessions Work

Dave came into our session again today to talk us about the articles that we are planning on putting in our newspaper. He started by asking us if we think that our chosen articles are relevant revision, is it interesting and will it give the reader something they couldn't get from reading something else?

He then got us to think about researching for the articles, would Wikipedia be good?, footnotes and quotes from other articles are useful and needed and possibly expert opinions?

He also said that the angle of how you go at this points matters too, to show you coming at the student angle - so they understand.

Tone is also important, will it be a news piece?, opinion piece?, feature piece?, interview? advertorial?

Presentation is also key and you need to make sure that the layout is interesting. There is no point having a page full of text as they can easily flick past but if they an image on it, something that draws them in - it will keep them interested to read on.

This was the meeting that we had to catch up on what everyone was up to and Dave(teacher) came into this meeting to talk further about the articles and then about possible funders/advertisers.

Mike - One of the Quality Control Leaders - Facebook

Mike has worked on making a blog where he can keep everyone's blog so that we are all able to keep track of what everyone is doing.
He has messaged all of us on Facebook to inform us of what he has created and the link that we can follow to the blog.