Back in high school, I was on the yearbook staff for a solid 2 years and it taught me collaboration, work ethic, accountability, and what a deadline is. The reason I bring up this past experience was because the same teachings are present within this final project. The biggest difference in favor of this final project was that this project could be applied to the real world. The great thing about this project was the fact that it wasn’t strictly a controlled environment selling yearbooks but that this would be a form of media easily accessible by anyone who wanted access. Not only would people from school have the ability to see it, but residence of Tokyo could see this website.
The project composed several concepts that we learned in the past. A big one was affordance and constraints. The biggest reason we changed from Divi to a different theme was because Divi had too many affordances that only someone who trained in such art of website design could create something exactly how we wanted it. maybe with more tim, we could have figured it out. Secondary research was also a big factor. This website is a compilation of others work. None of us actually visited the sites that we posted but took the original author’s word for it. Multi-Modality is a huge aspect because there needed to be not only work, but also photos and design elements. This makes the website more interesting. Through this project, I gained some digital literacy (even if it might be a small amount).
What I learned through this project is that a group can be difficult to work with but can lead to a final product much better than creating it individually. Between all of us there was collaboration and compromises that made what we have currently and are turning in. We might not be the best website designer, the universe knows we aren’t :), but it was still really great to play around with a website and actually get to call it our own. It felt great, personally, to work on a staff again. Another really cool thing about the project was that you (Mrs. A) didn’t restrict us to a certain theme or criteria but gave each of us creative dominance and let our group choose the best writings, and let our group make the website, and let our group come up with rewards, and let our group do pretty much everything. The only intervention that you gave was to help us improve the site, which in the end we could choose whether or not to take your advice.
Overall, I do recommend this project highly to future students. The biggest treason is because this is what being an adult is. There is compromise and not everyone can get exactly what they want. There are editors and executives who do critique your work in order to make it better. There is self accountability and deadline that everyone follows and if you don’t, you do bring down the rest of the team.