This week our group has taken big strides in completing of the website. I had many complications when it came to communication this week as I was driving across the country (Limiting my distance from everyone and everything) to help my mom move into her new house in Durango, CO. Then had to drive to Albuquerque, NM to get my flight back to Omaha. This took up several days and made it very difficult to find wifi, communicate, etc. My group did a very good job picking up the slack for me during this week and I am very grateful for that. It seems that we are just a few steps away from completing this crazy semester and I have total faith that we will end on a high note. I know that sentence has became repetitive in my blog posts, but I did it for a reason. It was a continuous reminder that I have faith in my group along with myself to succeed in this class and future endevours. So in the future I may try and plan better when I know that I will have struggles with communication and allow myself to adapt to the situations that I put myself in.

It is almost the end of the year! How exciting that truly is. Next week is practice presentations, so that obviously means we did not present nor did any group. I am just now thinking about how sad it actually makes me that I won’t actually see the final presentations of all of the other groups. I never really put that into thought, and now that I did I am slightly disappointed, but its okay. I think my team personally is super proud of the work we have done. We are still tidying things up on our website. But really, overall things are basically finished. I think my team should probably try to get together to practice our presentation before we actually present it to the other faculty. We also need to work on trying to actually all meet at once because we have had problems with that. Honestly, the whole corona virus thing has thrown everything off. I am not trying to make excuses for myself or my team members, but this entire situation has more than likely been one of the biggest adjustments all of us have had to make in our entire lifetime. That being said, I know we are all trying our best to be as normal as possible but it is sometimes hard.  Just here trying to be as happy as possible in this tough time. 

I think mostly what our team is struggling with finishing is the written portion and the infographic portion of our project. I think it’s partly because we have a lot of other classes to take into account and a lot of other work to do and staying organized has definitely been hard. Mostly what needs to be finished is final video editing and figuring out what other content needs to be added to the website. At the moment I believe infographics and writing are the biggest things, but it will be difficult to figure out where to put them since we don’t really know what we should have. I want us to be able to figure out what exactly we should add or tweak on our website based on the practice presentation, and figure out if we have enough content. 

This week, I’ve worked a bit more on the website and figured out a bit more about what we will need. I think we need infographics and statistics that we can explain in writing, and we need the video edited so we can figure out what we’d like to quote. I think the biggest thing to work on based on the website going forward will be a balance between writing and more visual content.

The obvious issue faced here is the inability to meet face-to-face for the past few weeks in order to practice for the presentation along with many other preparation necessities. The help we need from faculty is honest feedback and whatever they think would assist us in reaching the best grade possible. Equipment is an issue right now, that may be out of reach from administration helping out because of COVID-19. We have somewhat of an idea of who is going to present what slides. I want my team to get the most possible out of the practice presentation and really shoot for good feedback in order to develop a great final presentation. This I spent some more time researching and developing infographics. Also, keeping up with my team and Katie about what’s going on and what needs to be done. Challenges have stayed similar throughout this whole process, but now I have not been able to do some of my interviews. One because my aunt does not know how to work a computer and cannot figure out zoom or facetime. This was very interesting to say the least. A couple more just do not have the time anymore, one due to working at the hospital. Still feel confident and prepared nonetheless.

It is pretty incredible how fast time is speeding by. Even in quarantine with nothing to do most days, it seems like they all go by so quickly. We have our practice presentations next week which to me, it honestly seems unreal to have come in such a hurry. As for our presentation, overall things are well considering the current circumstances we have come across. I don’t believe we are really having any huge troubles with finishing any particular part of the project. The only thing that needs done is one last interview and then of course the actual presentation aka our website. No help is needed from the faculty as of now, which I think is a good thing because that means we are doing okay. We have yet to discuss which parts of the presentation are going to be dedicated to whom, but we can easily figure that out soon. I hope that my team can get some good pointers about what we can do better, and also what parts of the presentation turned out good. We didn’t do much as a team this week as really most of our work is all done. We did have our weekly check-in and discussed any problems or other issues we were having. 

So far, the project is coming together really nicely. The website has begun to develop and our group seem to see no issues in sight. Our group has talked quite a bit this week about what to expect from each other and how we are going to go about the rest of the semester. I still feel very confident that we will be able to finish the semester on a high note an be able to present here soon with complete confidence. I have been putting together many graphics for our presentation while also finalizing some extra interviews in order to access data for infographics and slides. Statistics was my primary focus this week and I hope to continue that into next week to gather the best data that I can. I believe that this will be essential into really understanding our topic outside of opinion that we have gathered from interviews and questionnaires. We have a lot of media collected as of now and I have a plan for myself so far to add to it in order to make a pool of information that we can gather from.

This week, I started the website for our project. So far, it’s been less putting content in and more laying it out and figuring out how it should be laid out. It opens with an animated slide of all the photos we have so far. My plan is to use some of these later as well, but have all of them on the home page as well. Now, we mostly have to figure out how we want to convey the information, especially the graphical and chart information. I think the biggest thing right now is it will be hard to get a ton of extra content with the social distancing rules being in place. We could get content from interviews over zoom, but it won’t be easy to get photo content. The only other challenge we’re facing is how to make the graphical information interactive and interesting to look at on the website.

I think the biggest thing I would want to do differently next time would be figuring out back up plans for collecting media, but at the same time, the crisis going on right now is a bit unprecedented and unimaginable so it would have been hard to plan a backup plan for this type of situation. I think, for how quickly and drastically everything changed, we’re doing quite well adapting and will still be able to put a good product forward.

The project is coming along nicely. We have started piecing together each of the parts to create the final project. One team member of mine has started on our website and is working to perfect the layout of everything. She is still waiting for our final media to plug that into the site. This week I personally captured a few more pieces of media for our project. I am unsure of whether or not we will be able to get any more interviews or not because of the current pandemic happening around the world. I believe one of my other group members is going to try to record an interview through the use of the Zoom video software. If I could do things differently for my next project like this, I would probably do a better job of planning how and when I will capture my media. I think I could have definitely done more and captured more content, but things kind of took a turn after COVID-19 began. We had another meeting as a team on Wednesday to discuss our progress and if we had any problems or challenges with the project. I am hoping that things still turn out good even with all of the new obstacles the world threw at us. It is exciting to think we are so close to finishing up this project.