Our team has not presented yet, since practice presentations have been pushed back. For my contribution this week, I have finished editing the video we need and have looked at some ideas for our website. I’m planning on adding the video in early next week so I can incorporate it into the layout. For challenges this week, my main issue what my Adobe Premier application crashing a lot. I lost a decent amount of progress the few times that it happens because I trusted the auto save a little too much. Going forward I will be setting a timer to remind myself to save regularly.

I don’t have much else to say because that I’m excited to see our project come together. I think the end result could have an impact on Lincoln by bringing to light a subject that many Lincolnites may be miseducated on. It’s also an opportunity for the local DACA recipient voices to be heard, and I think that’s exciting.

Next week we begin practice presentations and our team plans on doing a practice run prior to that just to make sure that we’re all on the same page. I am excited for us to finally be able to share a glimpse of what we’ve worked on this semester even if it turns out a little different than we had initially planned. I’ve really enjoyed getting to work with my group and I appreciate the effort that everyone has gone to finish this project even with all of our chaotic schedules. I think that we’ve all done a good job of having communication and working together despite not actually being able to see each other in person. This past week i worked on gathering some extra resources that might be helpful to tie into our project and tonight I’m finishing up the last of the transcriptions.

This week we are putting the finishing touches to our website up to this point. I think that the interactive portion of our website was what I was questioning the most throughout this process, just because it took us the longest to come up with, I think we all had a really different idea of what we though it should look like for a long time. Once we got the idea of the timeline set I could really see it all coming together, and I think that that was a really good decision for us to make. Now that I have seen the photos that the participants have sent in, I actually really like that that is the route we ended up having to take, because I definitely think it adds more to each of their stories and allows the readers to see who they really are and get a glimpse into their lives, as opposed to just seeing some photos of them on the day that we interviewed them.

The only challenge that I really saw this week was actually a personal one on my part. Up until now my parents have both been considered essential and did not have a way to work from home, so it was just my sister and I working on the wifi in our house. Now, both of their employers have come up with solutions for them to work from home and our wifi has been known to crash if all of us are trying to us it at once. This unfortunately happened many times this week, which made it so that I could not connect with my group as well as usual. Up until now this had not been a problem, which I feel extremely lucky about, I just feel as though now I have missed out on conversations this week that I really could have benefited from.

This week, we are putting the finishing touches on our website before we do our practice presentation next week. Personally, I have been putting together the interactive part of our website which includes a timeline. I made boxes that have various dates in them and once they are hovered over reveal the fact about DACA from that date. I think this is a very interesting way to show the history of DACA while keeping the viewer engaged. I also created a logo for the front of our website. Because our website tells the stories of a variety of different people, I thought it was important to create a graphic rather than only featuring one of them at the beginning of the website.

We still need to put together the stories in an organized and engaging manner. I think this could be slightly challenging just because we have so many pieces to put into these sections (photos, transcribed interviews, audio, and video interviews). It will just be important that all of these parts are balanced and don’t take away from one another. Once we get everything put together I think it will be super beneficial to get on a zoom call and go over how to divide the project up when presenting. This way, we will be able to practice going over talking points and making sure we seem like a united front when presenting. I hope to get good feedback on our project that we can implement into our final website design and presentation.

With everything being online, we are missing out on the opportunity watch the other groups that present before us. This is a bummer for me because not only would it be interesting, but we miss out on a huge learning experience. It would have been nice to see other presentations and be able to take some things that they were doing and implement it into our presentation, and for me watching a few presentations would definitely help make me more confident. Our group has planned to have a practice presentation before our actual presentation and I think it is a great idea. We will have multiple opportunities to work out the kinks and really buckle down on what it is we need to have for our final presentation.

This week we have been adding and picking through our website. This is a busy time in the semester and it doesn’t help that we are fully online. I feel pretty confident about where we are right now and where we can be by next week, but being in person and on campus would obviously make all of this much better. We are going through our storyboard and getting things set up where we want them to be and making sure that our content is ready to, and it has definitely made us rethink some content once we actually see it on the website. Overall it has been a concerted team effort trying to button this website up and making sure it is ready to go for some practice presentations.

As we prepare for next week’s practice presentations, I see my team struggling with putting all the pieces together. I think we are still on track but it looks to be our greatest hurdle so far. For the most part, the only thing that needs to be finished is fine tuning some media, finish or website with that media, and coordinate the final presentation plan. As far as faculty help goes, I think we would benefit most from an honest critique as well as more ideas on how to different ways to implement our ideas. We haven’t finalize presentation roles but I am planning on volunteering myself and I would guess Jacqueline will be presenting as well.

My contribution to the group this week was finishing up the video edits and sharing my progress with the group. I also helped brainstorm ideas for the website. What I had difficulty with this week was communication. I’ve found myself hitting a wall on how much screen time I can take because between working from home and studying from home, I’ve gone numb from devices. I think this week I’m going to figure out ways to take efficient and effective breaks during the day like going for a walk or drive.

This week we have all continued to work on the assigned portions of the project. We have completed all of the interviews, and I am now finish transcribing them so that we can put them on the website. In addition to this, the videos that we were able to get are coming together in editing, and we all talked about how we want to present the videos on the website, and how we would make them flow well with the rest of the information for the other people interviewed, seeing as we were only able to get video interviews with two people. We also thought of a good way to possibly summarize each person’s interview on the home page by finding the most interesting quote from their interview and add it with their photo. Then you could select the quote and it would take you to the extended version of their interview. Lastly, we finally came to the conclusion that we want our actual interactive portion to be a timeline. Our project is very research heavy, and there is a lot of important background information that we wanted to find a creative way to present, and we thought this would be the best option.

I think that at this point the hardest thing for us is that for some reason it is a lot harder for all of us to communicate what we are envisioning to the others in the group without us all being together in person. I know that something that I am struggling with is that I at this point can’t picture what the website even looks like, which makes it hard for me to think of ways to put all the information into it.

Our group is starting to put together our website and put the finishing touches on our various media. Right now we are mostly just struggling with turning all of our ideas into actual pieces of our website. As far as the interactive component goes, we are working out how to put that onto our website. We want to incorporate a timeline that you can hover over/click on to learn more information about what immigration and DACA were like at this time. This is nice to think about in theory but we might have to get creative as to how to actual do something like that with the limited knowledge of website building that we have. We have not discussed who is presenting what in the practice presentation but I think it will be easy for us to divide the tasks as we are all pretty knowledgable on all of the parts.

As we begin building the website, I am hoping that we can flush out design ideas and all agree on what works and interacts the best. We have all of the moving parts, now it is just time to fit them together in the best way that will intrigue the viewer. Through the practice presentation I hope that we can receive constructive feedback that we can implement into our final website. I also hope it gives us a chance to smooth over our talking points and figure our what the most important parts of our website and the story we’re telling is.

This past week I worked on getting the last of the interviews done and collecting images from our interviewees, and now Meghan and I are just going through and transcribing all of our interviews, which should be done by early next week. I think our group is doing a solid job of staying on top of everything, even with all the chaos. We have all the research and interviews we need, and now it’s just a matter of putting it together. We will be meeting early next week to discuss the details of who will be presenting what for the final presentation. I think our biggest challenge is going to be the interactive media, as far as figuring out how it will work through wix. However, I am confident in both Kellyn and Tyler’s abilities. It’s exciting that we’ll finally be able to put the pieces together and see our vision come to life. I will admit that it is a little scary too, because I know not everyone will have nice things to say. When we made the decision to go with this project, we were already aware of that, but it still makes me nervous, especially after hearing some of the discrimination and backlash that the people we interviewed have faced in the past when sharing their story. It’ll be interesting to see the reactions that we receive, but I’m hoping it leans more towards a positive response.

Our team is down to only needing to finish our website now, and I think this has been the hardest and most stressful part of the whole project. We have a lot of content and it has been hard trying to spin it all the way that we want it. Other than getting the website together and to our satisfaction we are done. I don’t think we really need anything from the faculty, it is all just up to us and and making sure that we see this through to the finish. We have not discussed at all who will be doing what part specifically but as far as I know I will be the one hearing the screen. I think the thing I want the most out of the practice presentation is some confidence and pride as a team for all the work we have out into this. I would like us to have clear vision and take as much critique as we can so we can iron out our last few wrinkles before the project is completed.

This week we all worked on putting the finishing touches on media so it could be shared and added to the website. I worked on some of the technical work for the website for example hover qualities and making sure all of our links were going to the correct places. I also went through all of the content that was to be added and assigned it to its appropriate place according to my story board. The website has been very stressful and I thankful that my teammates have stepped up to help, although I am the one that is heading the website part of the project it is a lot of work is probably the most important part of the entire project. In the future I would probably request the content that we collected be sent to me sooner so that it could go into the website shortly after we did it rather than this close to the end like we are doing now.