Bailey MeCey

As we move on with the course, the goal of this week was to continue with pre-production. The pre-production will help to set the course for the project and iron out minor issues. After the significant change in the project from last week, it felt good to be on the right track.

The project’s first goal is to interview those in the non-traditional education models. To do that, I researched local schools that use either Waldorf, Montessori, or ERP models. Given I was likely not to hear back from most, I reached out to more than I would need to be safe.

Thankfully, I got some responses. In the next week or two, I hope I can conduct the interviews, either by video call or email. The preference would be for Zoom, as it allows for a better connection with the subject that you can miss from a written response.

With the interview emails sent out, I could move on to the next step of pre-production; writing the blog outlines. The outlines will serve as a guide to help me organize the information and build the structure. While the outlines will help develop the structure, I don’t want to have them so dense that they overtake the blog. After the interviews, I want to review and see what fun directions I can go in with the writing, but it helps to have the foundation there, so I know where to go.

After the outlines were complete, the next step was to create the publication and social media page that the content would be hosted on. After doing some research, I decided to go with the platform Medium to publish future blogs. Medium, developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, is a blog platform that allows anyone to create their blogs and publications. I also enjoy Medium because it provides for blogs to be shared and connected with similar content. With that, your blogs can be shared with audiences interested in the topics you are writing about easily.

After creating the publication and making a placeholder image, I did a quick test to see how the article would look. The layout I picked is meant to highlight your images, so I hope my blogs will stand out with strong visuals. I created an Instagram account as well that will function to share the content on a different platform. With these two platforms, I feel that my blogs will do well in reaching new audiences interested in the topic.

Looking back on my project management plan, I feel I am on the right track. My interviews completed by this week give me enough time to write the blogs and edit. I’m still leaving enough room to be flexible, depending on how the interviews go. I’m still hoping to do two interviews for each model, but I would love to do more if possible.

Looking ahead, the primary goals are to do the interviews and start writing the blogs. I’m also going to begin to plan for how I want to the project to work visually. In a perfect world, I could visit each school and take photos myself. However, that is not the case currently. COVID-19 makes it extremely difficult to see schools, so some decisions will have to be made for the project’s visuals soon.

After receiving feedback, the suggestion of reaching out to a parent that has a child in one of these models was raised to add another perspective. While the original goal was to focus on the people directly involved in the teaching, having a parent speak on their experience would add a lot of credibility. I hope that through my interviews, I can get in contact and talk with a parent.

Throughout this week, I did something I had never done before; create a production journal. The production journal keeps track of the tasks completed throughout the week and how long it took to do them. Some tasks went quickly, while others took much longer than I was expecting. Keeping the production journal helped me to stay focused on the tasks for the week. Along with the Trello project plan, checking off completed tasks helped keep me motivated.

These next few weeks will be a rush, but I’m excited and hopeful for how the project is coming along.