The development of the various pages required different writing styles to fit the audience and I found that the unrestrictive nature of the assessment really helped with that. For the home page, I was inspired by other websites who used animations to introduce themselves and so I used Powtoon to create an animation to introduce my blog which was a really fun learning experience. However, due to my inexperience with Powtoon and animations in general, I found that I spent an unreasonable amount of time on the animation and so in the future I hope that I can draw from my experiences with Powtoon to create better animations in a reasonable timeframe. I also hope to be able to use more visual aids because I found that I used too many words in my animation but this is also due to the fact that Powtoon was fairly limited in animations as I only used the free version of Powtoon.

 

I found that the scientist page was the easiest to write for because I did not have to explain each of the terms I was using and I also didn’t need to write in a formal tone because it was a flowchart and the images also helped me explain my science topic. I used draw.io which was a very easy site to learn and I will be using that site in the future. I also had many ideas that I wanted in implement in my flowchart such as turning my flowchart into a cycle to show the water cycle but this was too much content for me to pack into my flowchart which would have made the flowchart much more crowded than it already is.

 

I found that the public, policymaker and investor pages were the most difficult to create because of the technical issues with recording and making sure not to include too many technical terms that would have to be explained which would have made the recordings unreasonably long for my audience making it difficult for them to follow along. Therefore, in these pages, I avoided talking about the step by step process of these water treatments but more on the benefits and importance of these water treatments which were my main take-home message. If I was to become a serious science commutator to the public, I would have to get a better microphone because I found that my recordings had a lot of static noises or background sounds that could distract listeners which could be because of my setup or laptop microphone. In the future, I would also try to learn other programs to create my videos such as the Adobe programs shown during the lectures. I found that using my phone’s recorder app to be fairly restrictive because I didn’t know how to add background music or sound effects to keep my audience engaged.

 

This assessment in comparison to assessment 3 was much more difficult because it was less restrictive and forced me to use many different forms of media to communicate my science topic water treatment such as a poster, flowchart, interview and video. It is also due to the unrestrictive nature that I was able to learn different programs that could be used to create content better suited to my audience rather than large boxes of text in assessment 3 which isn’t how science is normally communicated to the majority of people outside of science.

 

Overall, I found this assessment to be very challenging but also a good learner process as I got the chance to practice communicating my science topic to a range of audience through a range of different media.