This week has been a bit of a rough one. I am currently in Austin, Texas, away from home, so getting work done is a bit harder due to the fact that I don’t have as many resources as I would at home. That being said, I’ve tried to use today to take a thorough look through canvas and make sure I’m up to date with everything I’ll need to do because I wasn’t super on top of that this week and I missed quite a few things in multiple classes because of it. One of the biggest things I’m missing is my master to-do calendar, which has all of my long term dates on it and which I use to fill out my short term to-do list on my laptop, so I need to go through all my deadlines and syllabi again to make sure I’m covered on due dates and have everything I need listed on my laptop to-do list. 

For the website, I think the biggest thing will be how we want to share our information. Once we figure out how we want to share the main part of our media, we can also figure out what we might need extra to supplement what we have. I’ll be doing most of the website stuff, and I’m planning on setting up the bulk of it this coming week. Now that I have a week of class under my belt, I’m hoping the second week will go by more smoothly and I’ll know what to expect and be better prepared. 

I think that a good website starts from the inside out. The small details are essential when it comes to making a website that matches you and your group’s goals. Each website should have its own personality and stick out of the crowd. This is how you are able to advance yourselves past competition (if there were competition for this project). Navigation settings are something that was brought up in almost every single presentation that we watched. Whether it was good or bad, it was somehow pointed out. The best way to translate our story to the web, we think, is testimonials and visuals. We have not spoken much on the ability to see the website different from mobile and desktop. We have not gotten a great start to the website quite yet, but our communication has kept up and we expect to finish everything ahead of the deadline. our contribution was pretty even across the board this week with mostly brainstorming and coming up with ideas before the actual process. I believe the creative steps are important so that everyone is excited and on board with what we are doing. Again, I have faith in my group and I to surpass expectations and finish the semester on a high note through these tough times.

This week was our first week “back to school” after spring break and all of these other crazy events unfolding within the past few weeks. We met as a team on a quick Zoom meeting on April 1st to discuss any questions, problems and other things we might expect to encounter with the completion of this final project. Making a good website comes with lots of planning and research. In order to create a stylish and functional website, I think it is always a great idea to start off by looking at other work that is already out there to stem off of to help us create a new idea with one common factor behind it all. Translating a story can sometimes be difficult, but in our project, I think the interviews and data visualizations will be super key to having a well-rounded, solid functioning website. I do think our website will more than likely look at least a little different on mobile versus a desktop, but that is okay. I think it is sometimes refreshing to have them look different that way you can have something new and exciting to look forward to if you are browsing a site on different platforms. I am not sure at this time what will be different between the two forms of our website. We briefly talked as a team about other progress we’ve made, but other than that, not much else was accomplished as it has been an odd week coming back to school remotely. 

Since they were no presentations this week it is hard to address the beginning of this blog. I imagine that everyone would have done a great job since they are last and had the experience of witnessing and learning from everyone elses presentations. This week my group has done very limited work because of the canceled classes and along with my lack of communication outlets over the past few days. It has been very difficult not being able to leave my home due to COVID-19 and the worries with everything on the news but also trying to keep up with everything for all my classes and work. What is going on is something I have never experienced before so it is hard to maintain the same schedule that I was on before. My group and I will continue to try and be better with spring break coming up and possible online classes from here on out. Communication is going to absolutely essential to finish the semester the same way we started it. This is going to be through our group text message group, google drive and equal participation. I am still confident that we will complete the semester strong as a class.

I presented my website this week via Zoom. It was a bit interesting to say the least. There were a few technical difficulties, but I feel as if it went well overall. I learned a lot from the previous presentations that helped me prepare for Thursday. I felt that everyone including myself were well prepared and presented very smoothly. The only issues that I ran into was that I did not have a lot of words on my website or separate pages to show. Along with the technical difficulties that came with the zoom call. The best part about the website was the visuals and how they went along with the narrative that went with it. It’s been difficult for my group and I to meet up due to everything that’s going on with COVID-19. We still have managed communication and remain on the same page to continue our success throughout this whole epidemic. We need to update our team schedule and be more active in our google drive folders. It will be difficult but i have full confidence that we will be able to overcome this hardship. What I did to contribute is make some graphics for our presentation and uploaded them so my team can look at them whenever they want.

The past week has been pretty hectic because of all the developments happening with coronavirus and classes being canceled. I’ve been trying to stay updated on everything that’s happening, but honestly, I’ve been receiving so many emails from professors and the university about steps going forward and I haven’t been able to keep track of a lot of stuff. I’ve spent a lot of this week moving from Lincoln to Omaha and checking out of my dorm, so I haven’t had much time to organize anything as everything’s been up in the air.

Moving forward, it will be harder to get things like group projects done. Without class time to sit down and meet in person, it will be interesting to see how easy it is to stay on track and remember to get work done. Personally, I’ll probably be spending a lot of spring break reorganizing my to-do list and going through canvas to see what needs to be done for each of my classes and figuring out how all of that is going to factor into everyday life now. 

The good thing about our project for this class, in particular, is that we had finished a good portion of the video interviews when all of this began. We have cohesive interviews with at least one student source and one older adult source, which in itself is a great amount of information to have. Now, it will just be a question of what other media can we collect and what other media do we need. I believe we also have quite a few pictures. The question will be, how easy will it be to reach out with things like surveys to get more broad input from a mass of people? I think we’ll still be alright to finish this project well, it will just take some time and adaptability. 

What a whirlwind of a week it has been. Honestly, I think this has actually been the longest week of my life and I can only imagine that a majority of others are feeling the exact same way. This being said, obviously no interactive analysis presentations occurred with the cancellations and the move to remote classes for the remaining of the semester. Having to endure all of these changes has been difficult because I don’t think that anyone was expecting this to happen so quickly and at such great lengths too. Because of this, our class time will look much different. Our team will have to adapt to make some major changes to complete the remainder of the project. One thing that will be crucial is our team meetings being shifted to an online platform such as Zoom to discuss our progress, problems we may be having, and other topics regarding the assignment. Another thing that will need to happen is shifting the way our remaining media will be captured. Our access to the equipment has been limited because of the COVID-19 crisis, so now we will need to adapt and use other means. This may mean having to use our cell phones and laptops for more media coverage. These challenges are by no means convenient, but we can conquer the challenge with some hard work and dedication to further and grow our education.