One Final Evaluation - What did I think of J198?

Well, to put it simply - I LOVED it! I really did. I think this was an amazing class, and I would go so far as to say that it should be a requirement for journalism students. What we learned in this class is undoubtedly the way of the future, and is an incredibly important skill to learn before we go out into the job world. I'm so glad that this was offered before I graduated, because I would have really been jealous if I hadn't been given the opportunity to take it.

I also think that Professor Littau is a great professor. He's is extremely knowledgable and passionate about the subject, and that really gets the class interested in working on the material. He did a great job explaining how to use all of the programs, such as Windows Movie Maker and Prism File Converter, which are really complicated to use. He was also happy to help us out whenever we had a problem, which was often. Overall, I would give him a great review.

I also enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of the classroom, and how we were given the opportunity to go out on our own and really learn through trial and error. I did not mind going to class, which I cannot always say for every class I've taken.

Overall, I think this was a great class! I would recommend it to anyone, and am extremely glad that I took it. I plan on maintaining my Twitter account, and maybe even starting a personal blog of my own. Who knows? It's exciting to think about what I can do with the material I learned here!

An Evaluation of the J198 Course Materials

I definitely think that the camera we used was a good choice. It was small, portable, easy to whip out and had a strong battery life and took good shots. It was also very easy to use, which was important for this kind of class. The tripod was good also, and though we attempted to use the lapel mic my group was not too fond of it, because it proved to be a bit annoying.

As for the books, I don't think they were very necessary. We learned a ton of things in class, and also got a lot of real-world experience, all of which made the books a little unnecessary and kind of a wasted expense. It's not that the books themselves were bad, but rather that I felt that they were there for no reason.

I think the handouts were MUCH more beneficial than the books. They really spelled out, in an idiot-proof kind of way, exactly what we needed to do and served as a great guide to look back to later on. The one time we didn't have a handout, which was for the podcasts, disaster struck! We kept forgetting what to do. The handouts really kept everyone on track, and were a huge help.

I think that's all of the course materials! Overall, I thought they were great and really helped to create great pieces of work.

A J198 Evaluation of Myself

I signed up for this class because it sounded cool. Honestly, that was my main reason for it. I had taken Media and Society last semester, and enjoyed it, and was interested in taking another class with Professor Littau. I went into the class knowing absolutely nothing about multimedia. I had never been on Twitter, I had never written a blog post, never made a YouTube video, etc. etc. I was open to learning all about new media, especially because I thought it would help me out in the job market.

I think I would give myself a very good evaluation of how I progressed over the course of the class. I was very open to learning new things, and I became extremely proficient with all different types of multimedia. Sure, I got frustrated at times - who doesn't? - but overall I think I was able to produce some great content, and really explore how to write a story. I invite anyone to follow me on Twitter at @alrol, or log onto YouTube and look through my videos! I think I grew a lot over the course of the class, and became much wiser about the best ways to communicate a message through the different methods of multimedia reporting.

The Final Outcome

Well, our Web site is complete. J198 is finished, and our coverage of homelessness in the Lehigh Valley is officially over. Here's a link to our final Web site: http://www.lehighvalleyhomeless.net/

Our final presentation went extremely well. Everybody in the audience seemed to really take to our information, and we were especially praised on our video content and podcasts.

I loved our project topic. I think that homelessness is a problem that students at Lehigh constantly are unaware of or ignore, even though the homeless shelter is literally down the street from our campus. I admit to being completely ignorant about the problem as well. I love when you actually care about what you are working on, and that's exactly what happened with this project. I didn't mind going for an interview or to get footage, but rather looked forward to it.

I have to give credit to my fellow group members, Steph Albano and Alyssa Salem. I think we did some great teamwork and really put together a comprehensive, thorough and eye-opening project. I'm very proud of the work I did in this class, and am so glad that I signed up for it. Please comment with any questions you may have!

Our AWESOME documentary

Click the video to watch our documentary about the New Bethany Ministries. Trust me - it's AWESOME.

As you can see from my various blogposts, my group has been spending a lot of time at the New Bethany Ministries to try and gather information for our project. We captured a lot of images on camera, and have been working with Flickr to develop those into a slideshow that we can embed into our blogposts. Here's our first slideshow!

Podcasts - Definitely not my Favorite Tool

We learned in class how to make a podcast today. Professor Littau showed us an example that took him about two minutes to complete, and then we went off on our own. Steph, Alyssa and I recorded a five minute video about our experiences with reporting on homelessness in the Lehigh Valley, and then went to the computer to transfer it into a podcast. We used podbean.com to convert it.

That's when disaster struck.

Turns out, our video uploaded as a WMA file - which is a file that Podbean does not support. After about 10 tries and a ton of frustration, Professor Littau found the website youconvertit.com, which will transfer your link into the correct file. Well, we converted it to an MP3, uploaded it, and ta da! It worked.

But not so fast.

We then went to our blogs to try and embed the podcast into a blogpost. Well, once we did that, it did not play. Nor did it play during our second or third tries. After a little more trial and error, we finally found the correct embed code, and finally managed to get it into our blogs.

So, here it is. Listen to it! It took a lot of work to get this here.

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