Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Thursday, May 7, 2009 - 15:27

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A website is kind of like the human body. It has a head(er) at the top, a foot(er) at the bottom, we have a front end and a back end, and our center is the core… though we don’t usually call our arms navigation bars.
Unfortunately constructing a website is a little more complicated.
Before you even start building your site you need to decide what type of website you want to have.
Today we looked at and discussed what is known as open source, or freeware websites.
These websites are possible through a collaboration of efforts. This means multiple people act as administrators for the web site and can alter or change it as they wish. Drupal is an example of this type of web site.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 - 12:03

E-Journalism

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Talk about Multitasking to the max.
Doing a newscast in front of a camera is not as easy at it seems.
For some people it takes a lot to become comfortable in front of a camera, and for others its second nature.
In Either situation, a lot of work and effort goes into the standup besides talking into a camera.
Today we got a little taste of what its like as we filmed a closing standup for a news package.
The piece we had to present was only a few seconds long, but when you factor in that you also have to be thinking about your voice (projection, enunciation, and inflection) your movements (are they natural, are you moving too much), your facial expressions (are you capturing the audience and being expressive) and now you have to count yourself down, it becomes more complicated than you think.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 - 14:26

E-Journalism

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Take a deep breath... pretend you are talking to your hard of hearing grandma... and prepare to feel like an idiot.
These were the key tips we were to remember when recording clips for our website. The lesson was more difficult than expected. Speaking in an audible, clear voice and staying aware of your expression speed and intonation meant we all had to slow down and actually think about what was coming out of our mouths.
It sounds so simple, and even listening to a TV broadcast, the reporter makes it sound so natural.
How far from the truth that could be.
Most of us (especially girls) speak at a fairly quick pace normally, and when nervous or excited even faster. Because speaking fast is so natural to us, it takes more than a little bit of effort to slow yourself down and enunciate each word properly.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Monday, May 4, 2009 - 18:16

E-Journalism

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Former print journalists, now online journalism students had a glimpse at something familiar today.
After spending five weeks in editing suites, creating websites in Dreamweaver, and making bouncing balls with Flash, the class gets an opportunity to return to their roots through “multimedia storytelling”.
Through discussion, we spent the day analyzing various styles used by CBC reporters when creating a news “package”.
After watching the news “packages”, we learned that a good news video could be broken down into “Past” “Present” and “Future” as well as script writing, visuals, and audio. Each reporter had a different style of presenting these categories but for the most part, when broken down they all contained the same basic elements.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Friday, May 1, 2009 - 18:47

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It was 7:30 on Friday evening when this blog was started.
It was a sunny day outside, but this reporter spent it in front of her desk…
She began the day at 10:00 am with two companions. One mister St. Denis, and one Miss Newlands. Where the others were… no one knows.
All three students were eager to finish their projects, but wondered where the three other classmates were.
As the clock ticked and the professor began his lecture the others still hadn’t shown up. Perhaps they were spending the morning hours moving into their summer residences?
The professor spent his few hours teaching the three the step by step instructions on how to post their soon to be completed web sites onto the internet. Even though the steps were many, it didn’t seem overly complicated, but then again we had yet to try it for ourselves

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 18:19

E-Journalism

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Links, image maps, and backgrounds... how do you make a webpage without them?
Today we reviewed how to use each of these tools. We learned their functions for the first time during the first week of class in our introduction to DreamWeaver.
Although the day was a review it was much needed. Going over the functions, and how to format these tools helped turn the light bulb back on and get us back into the Dreamweaver way of thinking.
After lecture, we were all given work time to finish up or work on whatever we needed to complete. Some of us used this time to enjoy the moment our CD’s popped out of the computer holding the final version of our DVD’s, and others began or continued to work on their web pages.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - 17:45

E-Journalism

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The final assignment of week five will give us an opportunity to bring everything we’ve learned over the past few weeks together in one project.
Today we learned how we can import the projects we have been creating (or new projects using the same software) into DreamWeaver to create a website that contains a variety of media. The process is fairly similar to how you would import a file into other programs with the exception that you need to specify if your importing a flash, movie, or image file.
It’s an exciting opportunity for all of us to finally see what we’ve been learning over the past week, and the extra “work on your own” time will be put to good use.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Friday, April 24, 2009 - 19:41

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Flash is done.
Today’s assignment went well.
We had to take everything we learned over the last week and incorporate it into one project.
For my assignment I chose to display everything I learned through a home walk through. I wanted the final project to look similar to something you might see on a real-estate website, where you could view a home and all the rooms before you went to see it.
The assignment was fairly simple for the most part. Linking the pages together and getting them to work together the way it was envisioned was more difficult.
Over all the week was fairly successful. We all learned something even if it was just that Flash is really really frustrating.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 15:06

E-Journalism

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Possibly one of the most frustrating things ever occurs when a non-computer genius (aka. Me, aka. Computers confuse me) gets in front of a tutorial to learn how to do something and the tutorial is ...

wait for it.... wait for it .....

WRONG ... ALL WRONG!!!!

It’s understandable that people make errors. Were all human, and things happen.

But as said earlier, many of the people taking this program (aka... every one of us excluding Mr. St. Denis) do not understand this program and can become easily confused by basic step by step instructions.

So it would be very helpful that when you’re creating a step by step tutorial and notice that you’re making a mistake (and we’re not talking one mistake... we’re talking at least seven to ten mistakes) that you rewind your video and remove the error, redo the mistake with the correct instructions and move on.

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Submitted by Kelly McKinnon on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 16:40

E-Journalism

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It bounces, it zooms, it ....goes back to the start page?
Today was basically a review of yesterday....
EXCEPT WE GOT TO MAKE A BALL..... THAT BOUNCES.... OH YEA!
You read correctly. We can now create a flash video (a very unprofessional looking one) that has a ball that can BOUNCE.
Understandable we are not going to jump right into creating top of the line, advanced flash media, but what we are creating is really basic looking. Hopefully that will change soon.

Back to the original topic...

We created a flash ...thing?... today, again following the tutorials given to us via web ct.

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