This week’s readings and PowerPoint materials provided us with very valuable insight on making brochures, pamphlets, and flyers. This was especially beneficial for our group, because our project consists of designing four brochures for the local D.A.R.E. program to distribute to parents. I never would have realized before how important the pictures, captions, and other details are to the effectiveness of the brochure itself.
One of this week’s readings discussed plagiarism, copyright, and using the work of other’s fairly. As we discussed in class on Wednesday, plagiarism seems so avoidable with just the use of common sense, but it occurs frequently. Many times, people can plagiarize unintentionally. This could be because they are not fully educated on the exact material that requires citing. Other times, people may plagiarize purposely. I obviously cannot say why people might do this, but it could be attributed to laziness or the thought that they might not be caught.
This week’s resources were all very helpful. After watching the two YouTube videos, I feel much more comfortable and ready to create a Gantt chart and manage a team. The Gantt chart YouTube was especially helpful because it explained how to create this chart in the new Excel 2007. Also, it was very detailed, and it answered the questions and eased hesitations that I had about Gantt charts prior to watching the video.
The readings for this week were very helpful in creating our 300-word memo and preparing for the formal proposal. I now fully understand that this project starts off in a persuasive manner. Our group will be persuading an organization to believe and do various things. First, we are persuading them that there is a problem within their organization and a potential for improvement. We are then persuading them that we understand their problem and that we have the ability to solve it.
For project 2, our group was able to successfully evaluate the D.A.R.E. America curriculum and analyze ways to improve the local efficiency of the program. Because of our success with this past project, our group would love to continue working with D.A.R.E. We conducted a significant amount of research on the D.A.R.E. program, and we understand that there are many areas that could be improved for the local programs. If D.A.R.E.
This week, I read the description for Project 3: The Client-Based Service Learning Project as well as the Cient Criteria. I think that this assignment will be extremely challenging, but a great learning experience at the same time. I am nervous about finding an appropriate organization that is interested in collaborating with us, but I know that once we do, we will be able to create a mutually beneficial project in the end. Although getting started on this assignment seems intimidating, I am very excited to see how the small business world works.
Because there were no real specified readings this week, I instead will discuss the benefit of the peer evaluations we completed.
Editting the White Papers of other groups within the class helped us to see different ideas for the paper that we might not have seen ourselves. This could be in regards to organizing content with headings and subtitles, the format and design, or even the color schemes used to emphasize the subject of the paper.
I am so happy that the White Paper is finally finished! We all worked very well together, and I learned a lot about group collaboration by experiencing many situations of disagreement and compromise. All of these situations, however, helped to make our White Paper the best it could possibly be.
This week, I found the majority of the readings very useful. However, I was not really pleased with the “BadPresentations” PowerPoint. The entire document was a bad presentation in my opinion. Even the “Better Example” slides weren’t that great of examples. I’m hoping that there might have been an error with some of the slides, because many of them seemed to contain overlapping text from multiple slides.
The rough draft of our White Paper is complete! However, there are still a few improvements we can make before the due date next Friday. I would like to change the way certain parts of the White Paper are written, and I am sure that there are still grammatical errors somewhere within the paper awaiting correction. Also, the format is acceptable, but I’d like to see it tweaked and given more of a “professional” flair.