Learning Reflections

My presentation on the Swans February 21, 2012

Before I started my project I completed a project plan. In the project plan I gathered all the images, information, links and other types of media that will be used in my project.  This was useful because it made the project easier to complete and I can refer back to my plan whether I got stuck. The plan stated pretty much everything that will be included in the presentation. It also showed where I will get my information from

I decided to base my project on Swansea City Football Club as following the Swans has been a passion of mine for ages. I have been to more games than I can remember, from dark and wet Tuesday nights watching the Swans play Yeovil to thrilling, fast paced action against Arsenal. It also seems fitting that we are enjoying our finest season in ages so I enjoyed looking back on how we got to the top league.

I decided to use Microsoft PowerPoint to complete my project as it is the easiest tool for combining media together to create a presentation that would be eye catching, informative and fun to look at.  Features that I used to complete my project included animations, grouping of pictures, slide transitions and word art. I already knew how to group pictures, use word art and combine text and images whilst creating my presentation.

I gathered information from Swansea’s official website (www.swanseacity.net) and BBC Sport (www.bbc.co.uk/sport). These were good websites to use because BBC is a very well known and big company that receives it profits through T.V licences. So when you gather information from there you can be certain that the information you use from there is reliable. I was not allowed to use the pictures on their website but I was allowed to use their information as long as it was not for commercial use. The official Swansea City website is reliable because it is run by the actual club so the information that is on there is defiantly trustworthy, like the BBC website I could not use their images without permission but I can use the information that they upload.

I found it easy to upload my resources to Diigo and upload all my work to Mahara. Diigo is a tool that lets you save your resources so you and others can look at them later, it was very handy as it kept all my favourite pages in one place. It also let me highlight parts of a website so I can refer back to those later. Mahara allowed me to upload all my work online so I can access and edit them at home. By using ICT it was very easy to combine text, sound and images to create an informative and eye catching presentation. For example creating the timeline was easy because it was very simple to combine text and image together to create information. By using ICT it was easy to gather up all the relevant information from specific websites to complete my presentation e.g. www.swanseacity.net had a lot of relevant information on Swansea City Football club.

I did get stuck along the way and I found that gathering images of Swansea City Football Club that were not protected by copyright was hard. I was limited but I did find a few good images towards the end, including a few that me and my mates had taken. I also had difficulty with the amount of space you had of each slide, I found that when you add a header and border you did not have enough space for readable information such as text and images. I wish that Microsoft decided to increase the size of each slide, unless you can do that and I’m just being ignorant.

I believe that I have managed to get my point across, I wanted to highlight Swansea City’s past and describe their present. I wanted to give information on key games and key players, also give information on the past season and last seasons play off final. I belive that I have put my point across because everything that was stated in the plan has been put into my presentation.

I could have made an improvement on the look of the presentation, for example, make the presentation less cluttered by narrowing down the information and deleting some pictures. I belive that I could have added a video to the presentation, for example, a video of the Jack Army chanting a song or a video of some of the Swans players in action, That would have made the presentation even more informative and eye catching.

I would like to improve my skills in creativity when it comes to making a presentation, for example, making it stand out more by using different types of animations, videos and images. I would like to improve my skills in developing slide masters and templates so it will be easier next time I want to create a presentation. I also want to develop my skills in creating different types of graphs.

I have learned how to compress images so it makes the file size smaller. This will be handy if I’m running out of space on a pen drive or a hard drive. I have learned how to develop slide masters and use graphs in my presentation. I have also learnt how to use timings in my presentation so when I need to read out a lot of information I have enough time.