Documentation

For the first idea of our research proposal the research was mostly focused on one source  and information from  personal experiences. After carefully reading the requirements for the group documentation project, it was clear that we did not fully understand the whole point of the project. Since the goal of the project was research and documentation, a topic that allowed the need to do research on several sources in order to provide information was vital. Choosing a researchable topic was no easy task, especially one on such a small scale. As the research  began, we found that it was necessary to refine the topic in order to find useful relevant sources.

The first area of our research involved searching within various online academic databases such as Google Scholar and EBSCO because of its ability to yield reliable sources. Due to the databases not providing the information sources we needed, Google scholar was then utilized which also did not prove very fruitful. We then enter our topic on Google, where most of the sources relevant to our topic were found. Although the use of Google for research is not ideal for the academic community, we were able to evaluate our sources by using an online tool named “easybib”. Each article that was deemed useful was evaluated with easybibs’ citation feature that told us whether or not the sources had been evaluated and deemed credible. If for some reason the information in the source appeared to be very useful but was not credible by easybib, the credentials for the author of the article was checked to determine if the work was done by an expert in the field.

After that we utilized prezi to start creating our presentation and to show the usefulness of prezi as an online tool. The first step in implementing the research proposal was deciding what information from the proposal was most important,then choosing the order of how they were presented. Thanks to prezi’s infinite canvas organizing each frame was very easy because it provided a visual roadmap of the presentation. By using the proposal introduction as the first slide, it allowed for immediate transition to provide information on why the information being provided was useful. Using the information from researched sources, the question of the usefulness of this information was answered. Using an image containing statistical information that shows the heavy dependence college students have toward tech apps and tools it proves how useful these tools indeed are for modern students.

 
To provide a list of the must have tech apps and tools for modern college students, a collage containing the logos for each tool was inserted into the prezi canvas. This image was created by googling each logo then combining them to create a unique image. The next step was implementing the information for each tool to the presentation. Thankfully  summaries with the descriptions and uses of each tool was done for the proposal with the aid of various sources. For each tool, an individual slide or frame was created, leaving the only task to transfer the information from the proposal to the presentation. The last three slides consisted of the video, documentation and work cited. The prezi presentation will contain a link to our information resource video which will be short stop motion animation clip explaining a little bit of what the tools can do and showing how these tools can be used in a college scenario to video with user friendly animations. In the video the tools that are covered are all the one’s that we mention except online microsoft word because it is similar to google docs and libreoffice. To populate the work cited slide, all of the sources that were used in our research were placed into easybib’s citation manager.

From there the export function provided a word document that organized the citations in alphabetical order which was then copied into the the prezi frame. One setback with this was that the prezi interface did not allow for the hanging indent feature. Because the documentation contained a wealth of information, it was omitted from the presentation since the option of utilizing the project website was available. Initially the proposal was only to create a resource that was unique and provided useful information. Our research has shown us that it is necessary to provide information about why there is need for what is being offered or its importance as well as finding a good topic. So we will provide in our presentation a more in depth explanation of each tool we covered. While making the stop motion animation we used imovie, while doing so a lot more time was taken than expected for a video that lasted a minute to last about one minute and thirty seconds but once it was done the stop motion animation was enjoyable to watch.