NOTICE TO STUDENTS

09/12/10

AS Media Studies – Monday’s Lesson

Due to circumstances beyond our control we have had to cancel p3 and p4 on Monday 13th December.

By Tuesday 14th December’s lesson you will need to have completed the following list of activities. Ms Poole will ask to see evidence of all of these things in the lesson on Tuesday.

Your Blog must be up to date with everything – the last post being about work you have done on your Main Task w/c 6th December.

You must have a storyboard for your video and this must be shown to Ms Poole on Tuesday.
Images

You must have taken ALL your original photographs for Main Task website by Tuesday’s lesson.
You need to BRING THEM IN ON USB to upload onto your website.
PLEASE DO NOT BRING PHOTOGRAPHS IN ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO UPLOAD THEM ONTO THE COMPUTER.

We feel that given this extra time on Monday you should be able to take all of the photos you need for your website. Remember, they must ALL be original images.

THERE WILL BE NO OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU TO TAKE PHOTOS IN LESSONS.

You will be working on your websites for 10 lessons after Christmas. After this time there will be no lessons available for you to work on Dreamweaver. Any additional work you need to do will be in your own time.

This is also the case with the Blogs as you will be working on your videos. Please ensure you are regularly updating your blogs at home.

Any questions/issues please email either of us on:

spoole@parliamenthill.camden.sch.uk
kmoss@parliamenthill.camden.sch.uk

Thanks

Ms Moss and Ms Poole

Nearly Christmas...

We have two weeks left before you finish for the end of term. It's time to check that you are up to date on your coursework.

You should...

Have all of your Preliminary Task information on your blog - research, planning, sketches, screen shots of your prelim website and audience research.

Your main task should be well under way - you research and planning needs to be uploaded onto your blog - including sketches. If you have any sketches you would like scanning in please give them to Ms Moss or Ms Poole.

You should have created your four pages and each of them must be hyper-linked. PLEASE MAKE SURE THIS IS DONE BEFORE YOU START ANY COMPLEX DESIGNING!

After Christmas we will start making your video, you need to make sure when you come back you have a completed storyboard to use when you're filming.

If there are any problems with your coursework please see either teacher asap.

Thanks!

Ms Moss

Students - where are you?

Hi everyone

We are now three weeks into your blogging and seven weeks into the coursework. So, where should you be with your work?

You should have:
- completed/almost completed your preliminary task. Do you have your two pages linked?
- Your diary should now be on your blog and you should be updating this each week.
- your inspiration pages and research should also be posted.

You should be heading towards:
- starting your research into a range of different charities websites.
- beginning to think about your own charity and the area on which you will focus.

If you know that you could have done more, remember - you can add to your blog at home as well.

If you have any questions please leave a comment on this post.

Bye for now!

Ms Moss

Exemplar work

Interested in what's been done before?

Check out:

http://www.parliamenthill.camden.sch.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=182&Itemid=219

to see work that students submitted last year.

What should you consider when planning your website?

Website development

Top tips for creating world-beating websites

1. Think about your target audience.
Choose colours and imagery that will both represent your radio station and appeal to
your core audience.

2. Be interactive.

Communicate with your audience, and provide them with opportunities to communicate with you, and with your website..

3. Use graphics and multimedia, but don’t go mad.

Most people still surf the web on a telephone line, and don’t want to wait hours for
your clever but OTT graphics-heavy page to download.

4. Make your site easy to navigate
If your audience can’t find the content they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else.
Make sure your navigation – the links and menus that take users to other parts of your site – are clear and visible.

5. Use the conventions
What features do you always see on websites? Do they always provide a contact email
address on the homepage? Do they always have a company logo? What else?

6. Make each page count.
Your audience doesn’t want to look at a page with nothing interesting or useful on it.

7. Limit your body type to Times New Roman, Arial or Verdana Basically, only these fonts work acceptably on all computers.

8. Use a layout grid
Give your webpage structure and an information hierarchy. Some examples of popular
layout grids are shown below – do you recognise any from websites you’ve visited?

Joel Sklar

Joel Sklar
Designing Web Sites - an illustrated introduction'

Users have to be able to quickly grasp the purpose of a website and what it has to offer - otherwise they will just click away to another site.
Research has shown that people tend to be systematic in the way they scan documents. For example, the diagram below shows ways in which people might scan three different websites.



The way people scan web pages
· On the left is an eye-scan of a person scanning from top to bottom and left to right. Since most Western people are taught to read this way, it is not surprising that this is the way we scan. This is one of the reasons that titles and banner are put at the top of pages - that's where most of us look first.

· The centre shows a person scanning the top, and then scanning towards the centre. A person might do this on a page with a title and its major content at the centre of the screen.

· On the right is an eye-scan for three-column web page such as a news service. The readers will try to scan the whole page to get an overview, but their eyes may catch something interesting, in which case they may scan the whole article, before moving on to explore the rest of the page. The FT.com website is an example of this.

Thus, for very practical reasons, the elements of web pages must be laid out in a way that maximises the chances that the user will see them when scanning, and take in enough information to decide whether or not to give them more attention.


Joel Sklar in his book 'Designing Web Sites - an illustrated introduction’ gives the following 'map' showing the areas of importance of the screen. It is a very good guide for those designing web pages.



Not every page can be laid out with the configuration above, but it is a model for the three and four column page websites such as many news sites. The Sklar model reflects the importance of the areas, Sklar's model suggests that the areas he labels as area 1 and area 3 are the most important for content, i.e. the centre and right of the screen.

Preliminary task - what do I have to do?

For your Preliminary task you need to design a Home page and a Media page for the Parliament Hill school website. You will need to:

To identify the elements of websites that are effective.
To steal the good ideas used by other sites in order to apply them to your own.

What to do:
Look at as many websites as possible,
Make detailed notes about some of them,
Make brief notes about others.
For some you may not make any notes at all.
You may wish to make notes on some elements of a website but not on others.

BE INDEPENDENT, MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH.

Remember the purpose of the research is to prepare for your own website.


Website Research

Purpose:
To identify the elements of websites that are effective.
To steal the good ideas used by other sites in order to apply them to your own.

What to do:
Look at as many websites as possible,
Make detailed notes about some of them,
Make brief notes about others.
For some you may not make any notes at all.
You may wish to make notes on some elements of a website but not on others.

BE INDEPENDENT, MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH.

Remember the purpose of the research is to prepare for your own website.


Task:

Look at the images of websites that are being passed round, make notes on them and study as many as possible. If you wish to study them in more detail, use Period 2 to do so.:

Look at the images of websites that are being passed round, make notes on them and study as many as possible. If you wish to study them in more detail, use Period 2 to do so.

How can this blog help you?

As you work on your blogs we will keep this updated so you can find handouts, hints and links that may be able to help you in the design of both your preliminary task and your main charity website.

Welcome to your Foundation Portfolio

G321: Foundation Portfolio in Media
This is a coursework unit where candidates produce two paired media artefacts from a series of briefs. This process involves progression from a pre-production, preliminary exercise to a more fully realised piece. The briefs offered are: print, video, audio and website. This unit is internally assessed and externally moderated.

The purpose of this unit is firstly to assess candidates’ ability to plan and construct media products using appropriate technical and creative skills (AO3); secondly to assess candidates’ application of knowledge and understanding in evaluating their own work, showing how meanings and responses are created (AO2); and finally to assess candidates’ ability to undertake, apply and present appropriate research (AO4). The unit requires candidates to engage with contemporary media
technologies, giving them the opportunity for development of skills in these technologies.

This is a coursework unit, internally assessed and externally moderated. Candidates produce two paired media artefacts in response to briefs set by OCR plus some appropriate evidence of research and planning. Set briefs are paired in order to provide progression from a pre-production, preliminary exercise to a more fully realised piece and will be in the same medium. This offers the opportunity for skills development to be assessed, as well as a final finished piece.

Website
Preliminary exercise: a new homepage for a school/college. This should include a photo of the institution, buttons to provide easy navigation to other areas of the site and appropriate welcoming text. There should also be a working hyperlink to a media department page, also with a photo. The task aims to demonstrate understanding of the software and of webpage conventions.

Main task: produce a campaign website including sound and video for a campaign (eg political, health, charity, environmental). The site should include a logo, original photographs, (minimum four per candidate), written text, audio, video and easy navigation. If done as a group task, each member of the group to produce at least four pages for the site, following the same house style. All material for both tasks to be produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of musical audio
effects from a copyright-free source.