134 Group 4

At this point in our project, we are starting to put things together. I think things are moving a little slower and are a little harder to do because we can’t meet face-to-face anymore. Luckily, we had captured most of our media before everything started going south. I think the thing that is going to be the most difficult moving forward is putting everything together and having it flow nicely because we are doing things more individually at this point. We assigned very specific duties to everyone, so it is just a matter of getting everything finalized and put together. Everything is moving along nicely, but I think we might need to start moving everything along quicker. I will be helping with the infographics and the writing of content on the website. It is definitely going to be more data-based than opinion-based this because we aren’t able to do anymore in-person interviews. Overall, I think things are going well for our group so far, and we are handling everything the best we can. We have good communication, but there probably needs to be more of it for the sake of the project moving on pace and getting finished on time.

We are moving along at a good pace I believe and I think we just need more B roll for our video footage and everything will be looking good. We are all still struggling with the class being online and trying to communicate. However, I think our communication has been pretty good so far. We can occasionally run into the problem of not being on the same page as each other but that is an easy fix usually. I still wouldn’t do anything different. I think our project is starting to come together nicely and I think the communication in our GroupMe is good. We knew we wanted to interview people who take part in OLLI and we knew we wanted to specifically ask them about ageism and I think we did that. This week I offered my help in designing the website for our project. I think this will be a fun piece of our project to do and I am excited to help with it. I think a hard thing for us to do when designing the site will be how to display the information in an effective way. However, I think the won’t be too hard because we have a lot of good information prepared!

I think what makes for a good website is something that is clean and easy to follow. Something that doesn’t have too many panels to find the information you are looking for and something that grabs a visitor’s attention to the website. I have noticed that when i’m online there seems to be a lot of websites that use a click and automatic scroll feature.  I think the best way for us to tell a story through web form is going to have a strong video and data and to really showcase what we have learned from our project in the most detailed way, but also extremely easy to follow and understand. I think what’s going to be most important when it comes to our project is data research and how we show that. Also to make something that the audience can sympathize with. I personally have not thought about how our website will look on mobile but after answering the question it will be a consideration now. I think for it to be accessible on all platforms it’s going to need to be an up and down website and not a lot of windows on the sides. This week I helped the group figure out how we are going to approach the rest of the project and i was part of the zoom conference to figure out our last steps.

In my opinion, a good website is one that is easy to navigate and flows together well. On our website, we want to make sure to include a lot of information while making it look good at the same time. I know that when I visit a website that is not well put together, I don’t spend much time on it before going somewhere else to find information. When watching interactive analysis presentations, I really liked how they kept the user engaged the whole time with moving parts, graphics, and other features. I think putting a twist on graphs is something we could really utilize now because our project will be more data-heavy. I’m glad we captured a lot of photos and videos while we were able to, so we will have some original content on our website. We were also able to get a couple interviews. This week, we started dividing up tasks more specifically because we will not be able to work together in person. We are also going to have to make a new, strict schedule to get this project done on time. I think we are making progress, but we are definitely going to have to speed things up in the next couple weeks.

I think a good website is really user-friendly, visually appealing, and is effective in getting the information across. My group has talked about using the website builder “Wix” to help and create our website. It is a program that is really easy to use and will help lead us to a good end result. I think we can effectively translate information on to our website by using bars and graphs. I also would like to add an interactive feature where you can click on each interview that we conducted. Also, I think a drop-down menu might be a unique way to allow visitors to our site to see the information. This week we have been discussing as a team in our GroupMe about how we are going to successfully complete this project. We are currently deciding what team member will take over what project. I think everything has been moving smoothly for us and I think we will be just fine as long as everyone does there part. Which I am not worried about since everyone seems to do their fair share of work for the project. We are still dealing with the challenge of not being able to meet in person but other than that I wouldn’t change anything about the group or project.

Now we are putting our website together. Some things that make a good website are creating a theme and having a balance of text and visuals. I think if a website has a great eye-catching theme, it makes me want to read it. Good color scheme, font, theme consistency. Etc. are all things I am hoping our website includes. Some trends I notice now are very wide screen margins. One trend of newer websites I’ve noticed is that they don’t seem to have borders on the side and a navigation side menu. It seems like websites have a horizontal menu on top, and the content is broken up by scrolling down and seeing the appearance of a new page. We will need to use pictures, videos, and text in an impactful way to tell our story. We are going to have to think of a good way to break up the information in a digestible and understandable way. I haven’t thought about the transition of mobile to web, and that is something we will have to consider when building our site. I think these next two weeks we need to focus on getting all of our research completed, typing the content, creating graphs, and editing photo and video before we think about the way the site is going to look.

I did not present this last week even though I wanted to. I learned that there are alot of different websites and the word interactive is sometimes skewed. Some of the websites that were shown were really good and a couple of other ones were not so good. I think that it’s definitely based on interest and what grabs your attention. I saw this week that a lot of people are getting used to presenting and becoming more comfortable with it. I saw that I am not going to use a powerpoint presentation. Instead I am going to be speaking about my website and subject in a talking form with a few notes that I have taken. I’Ve noticed that most people will use a powerpoint and I’ve also noticed that most people will tell what media is being used before actually showing any media. I will not be doing that as I feel like it is backwards and awkward. I think I will be avoiding an unclear topic. My website is clean and easy to understand. This week with our groups, I helped communicate how we would get this project done because of the virus. WE are encountering issues of finishing up content. We might meet in the future depending on what happens with this virus.

This week has created a few problems for us as a group. The COVID-19 global pandemic has made it difficult to get anything done. I think our project has a unique problem. Elderly people are the most likely to contract the virus and have the highest death rate of any age. So I am not sure how we are going to go about our project. This pandemic is expected to continue until at least August according to many medical professionals. However, our group was very active in gathering media for our project in weeks before this all happened. We conducted about 4 interviews of people taking the OLLI classes and what we have is good. Ideally, we would like to get even more interviews in but I think what we have could still turn into a well-done project. We still have been able to communicate with each other via GroupMe and still share ideas and provide solutions to this unique problem. I think our group is still doing really well and I wouldn’t change anything. We are still curious about how the project will work without in-person meetings as we practice social distancing but I think those questions will be answered with time.

This week has created quite a few complications for our group project this semester. Having to work as a group remotely will present a challenge in itself. We will have to schedule meeting times to keep everyone on the same page and to keep the ball rolling. Considering our project is relying on the participation of elderly people, the opportunity to gather new media does not seem like an option. If we can find an elderly person who understands how to conduct a video interview than we may have a chance, but I am thinking we will have to use the footage we have gathered in the previous weeks. We will also have to heavily rely on outside sources and other materials to supplement our website. We are discussing ageism, and we did not gather much information from our interviewees on specific instances of ageism. Statistics and a supplementary video from another source may help us explain the bias we are focusing on and explain somewhat of a story. At this point, my main goal is to create a website that explains ageism and provides some stories behind the topic. Hopefully keeping this goal in mind will get us on the right track.

This week, it has been hard to talk with the group considering everything going on and the changes we have had to make. I think moving forward, our main focus is going to have to be putting everything together to make a final project. We planned on doing this all together as a team, but that will not be possible now that we are all in different places. Considering how this class is a semester-long group project, we are going to have to figure out how to most efficiently finish out the semester. Something that could be hopeful in finishing this project to the best of our abilities may be to assign very specific tasks to each person in the group so that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and there is no confusion. We will also probably have to shift the schedule we made at the beginning of the semester to fit all of our current schedules. Something else that could be beneficial would be to set a time to virtually meet each week and evaluate where all of us are at in our specified tasks. Overall, the end of the semester may be a little more confusing and difficult than it would have been, but I am confident that we will come up the a final product to the best of all our abilities.