Special Topics Presentation

For this assignment, we were asked to create visuals to share with the class to help explain the article we were given in class. Carly Goodwin and I read "From Media Consumption to Media Production: Applications of YouTube in an Eight-Grade Video Documentary Project" by Ching-Chin Lin. To summarize, this article was about the use of YouTube in a classroom. It focused on a study that showed eighth graders working on a film project for their class. They would search videos to get a better idea of how they were done and then work on their own to create a video. After we read and got a good idea of what our article was about we had to have ten visuals that we can share with our classmates. We used a copyright sign, a YouTube logo, a graph showing how YouTube users are increasing, a chart that shows how technology is changing from the past to today, a chart that shows that watching YouTube leads to making videos, an example of cropping of an image can lead to a different perspective of the image, a picture of how YouTube is used in the classrooms and at home, vocabulary words that we found important in the article, and a video we found online about the use of media in a classroom. We also made our poster board look like a Mac Computer to add to our presentation. 

Answers to Krause's Questions

Connotation: Our visual style for this component ties in with our theme of YouTube because we used a YouTube video to share and also made our poster board look like a YouTube screen on a Mac Computer. We used color backdrops for our images that we picked at random and each image has a different size proportion. We showed other presenters our presentation and they seemed to perceive our poster and video as the same way we did. They understood what our article was talking about and it seemed to make sense to them just like we planned.

Attributes: I am satisfied with our visual weight, structure, color and presentational style. Posters may seem boring to most, but it gets the point across. I wish we got a little bit more creative in how we went about showing our material to the class, but the first thing we thought of was a poster. I wish I knew how to work Prezi or some other visual that would have came off a lot more appealing and interesting to the class. I think the video added a good touch because it talked about a lot of the points our article did of using media in the classroom.

Placement: The poster and the video were both the main focal points of our presentation. The summary that we had laid out was only there to give an overview of what we would tell them through our presentation. We summed up our article with the poster and video, which held a lot of people's attention, while the summary on the sheet of paper would not get the point across as well.