Author: Hebior Dylan

It is crazy to me how fast this semester has flown by! It is also insane to mention how far my group and I have come since the beginning of the semester. We went from having a whole project planned on learning how to Ice Skate , actually going ice skating, to having the whole world shut down, and ultimately having to come up with a brand new project on the fly.

Despite all of us being in different states I am very impressed with how well we were able to work as a team to complete our goal of successfully making a good project. Of course there are a few things that we could have done better, but without being together I think that we did an awesome job with what we had!

Overall I am very happy with how this project turned out. My group worked very hard and everyone did there work on time. I definitely look at this as a success and I am very lucky to have had the group members that I did to make this as smooth of an operation as possible. Thank you everyone!!!

This week my group and I were able to give a practice presentation on our project. Going into it I was a little nervous because we just had finished up our “rough draft” of the website. I was very happy with how well it turned out! I knew that our site looked good, but I was not expecting the great feedback that we got with our presentation. Of course we have somethings to work on, but overall I feel great with what we have and are going to have prepared for our final presentation.

This week I finished up my projected (besides a few edits that need to be made) and talked with my group about everything we can do to make our project the best that it can be. I helped to give advice on certain things and my group also helped me with some problems that I was having.

Going into out final week (which is crazy) I am very excited to present! I am very happy with how well my group and I have worked together so far and I am ready to finish the rest of the year on a good note!

With practice presentations coming up next week the only thing I could see our group struggling with is having all of our content completely captured and edited into the website the way we want it to be. Also, in my case it has been very difficult to capture my content at points because the weather has not been so great, but luckily it looks like there should be some nice days coming up ahead. Once our content is all captured, which most most of it is, all we really will have to do for our project is plug in everything to our site and customize everything the way that we would like it to be.

Ultimately what I would like to achieve through our practice presentation is completely understanding where we need to shift our focus for the remainder our time. I believe that once we know exactly what needs the most work, we will be able to make our project the best that it can be. Additionally from where we were at two weeks ago, I would say that were are in pretty good shape considering we basically had to start our project all over. I am very happy with how quickly my group and I have been able to switch gears and get our work done during these very weird times.

With the weather looking nice tomorrow I will be able to capture all my content, be able to edit it all, and finally put all that I have into the website. Although I do not have all the equipment that I wish I could use, I know that I will be able to make something pretty cool with what I have. I am very excited to see what I come up with, I think that plan that I have is pretty solid and I know that whatever comes with it is going to be really cool.

After switching our project idea I am finally in a place where I am very comfortable with where I am. I have decided to switch my subject from video games to Bags and I am very excited for this. I play Bags a lot and it is one of my favorite summer activities. I have a great plan for what I will be capturing for my content and I plan on completing this by the end of this weekend. I think that I will be able to make it pretty interesting and I will be able to give valuable insight on the game for the people who may not know so much about it.

This week my group and I all talked about what we had going on with our own individual activities during our weekly meeting and we all gave advice and suggestions to each other. Coming up this next week is the most important week for us because we all need to have our content captured and begin to finish up our website. This could either go very well or not so great, but I believe that with the work effort my group has shown throughout the semester, we will have nothing to worry about. I am excited to see what everyone comes up with because I know it will be great.

This week has been very different from all the others. We decided as a group to switch our project up do to the fact that we are not able to go ice skating anymore and capture content. We all decided that due to the times that we are in currently to make our website about activities you can do to help with the boredom that comes with a quarantine. I am very excited for this because we will all get the chance to do something that is very interesting and fun.

When it comes to our website I think something that needs to be incorporated is the ease of accessibility that comes to it. I believe, especially after all of the presentations we have seen, that a website that is able to flow nicely for the viewer is always the best. Also, I think the “story” that would be good to portray on our site is one that is showing a light at the end of the tunnel. Many people are starting to lose their minds in quarantine and I think it would be cool to be able to show them that there are many things that can be done at home to help make the time more enjoyable.

My contribution to the group this week was helping everyone decide on what our new topic should be and also picking my subtopic for our website. I will be doing a section on video games where I will be including this like: gameplay, interviews, recommendations, and where you can watch other stream video games. I am very excited for this because I love to play videogames.

Overall I am excited to see how everything turns out. It is going to be a lot of work getting everything set up, but I believe that we are moving in the right direction.

This week my group and I have not been able to much due to the fact that the Coronavirus has been taking over the country. We have a start on the website, but we cannot capture any media because everywhere is closed. This will be our biggest obstacle for the remainder of our project because we simply do not know how long places will be closed for.

Also, since I was forced to go back home to Chicago it is very difficult being so far away from everyone. In our zoom meeting I think that it will be beneficial for my group and I to try to create a schedule to follow for the rest of the semester that will ensure that we complete all of our tasks. I believe if we do this it will make the whole online thing much easier and we will be much more organized.

At the end of the day I really am not sure what to expect, I just hope that we will be able to capture some more content before our project is due. I also hope that the Coronavirus goes away soon because it makes everything way more difficult than it should be.

This week we were able to look at some very interesting interactive websites during presentations. My favorite website that we took a look at was the site that gave interesting facts about London. I thought that the use of graphic design that had was amazing, and all though I am not talented enough to create the things that they did I think that it would be awesome to find a way to incorporate some things like that into our project. Something else that I find out when looking at this website is that pictures are very important. The london website gave a lot of interesting facts about the city but there were no actual photos to look at on the site. I believe if they had photos the sites visitors would enjoy that a lot.

This week my group and I decided to plan on going ice-skating next week but unfortunately our semester got cut short so we will not be able to do that anymore. I also was told that I have to go back to Chicago this week so I plan on figuring out which ways I will be able to help my group out the most from there.

Overall, with all the changes that have come up in the past few days I am very confident that my group and I will be able to complete all of our tasks successfully, I am just very disappointed that we will not be able to all be together when it comes to capturing content.

At the mid-term point of the semester I am very pleased with how my group has been performing so far. I believe that for the most part everyone is pulling their own weight and I am also very pleased with our communication. We all make sure that we know what we are doing and aren’t afraid to ask the group if we have any questions. The only problem that I see our team having right now and this also goes along with the biggest challenge that we are facing at the moment is making sure that we can successfully use the equipment that we have to capture our media with. But even this really is not a huge problem because after our first day of capturing content we have took the time to make sure that we understood what to do.

My contribution to the group this week was helping outline our Preliminary Content paper and also writing the research portion of our paper. With this I did not face many problems, but if there were any it was just finding credible sources to use. There is not much that I would do differently in future because I feel that what I did was fairly successful.

I am excited to see what work we all accomplish next week!

This week although I did not present, I was able to learn quite a bit about what to use for my website. My favorite website that was shown was the Adidas recycled shoes. What I liked most about it was how it was very informative, but also at the same time they were very concise with how they presented it. Something that I would like to incorporate into my website would be the way the videos were used in their site. I believe that doing this will allow me to present great content and give my audience the information that they need to understand what we are going for.

This week my group and I really did not do much to further our progress on our project. We did plan on our big day of capturing most of our content to be on this upcoming tuesday. I am very excited to see what we capture and think that the whole process is going to be very fun.

In the future the only thing that I would change is that we, as a group, check in with one another at least once a week. I think that by doing that we will be able to stay more organized.

This week my group and I talked about what our schedule is going to look like for the rest of the semester. Also we decided on what equipment we are looking to use while we capture our media and how we are looking to capture it. I helped to propose interesting plans as to how we will record our process of learning how to ice skate and also helped to plan out our schedule.

We are looking to use a DSLR camera, a 360 camera (depending on how busy the rink is), a Gopro, lavaliers, and our phones. I am sure that we will be adding on to this as we go, but for now I believe that we have a great foundation.

Throughout the week the only problem that we encountered was creating our schedule. Being able to find a time that not only works for everyone during the week to go to the ice rink was difficult, but we also were having trouble thinking about which times the rink will be busy or not. Ultimately we ended up figuring out what we needed in the end.

I am very excited to see what we accomplish as a group for this project. I think that everything is starting to mold together in a great way, and as long as we are able to successfully capture our media we will be in a great position the rest of the way.