Thank you all so much for your generous donation of laptops to our class. We are so blessed and lucky. Not every student has a laptop at home, and not everyone could edit outside of school. When I was in media last year, we didn't have this many laptops, so we had to do a lottery and draw names from a hat to see who could get a laptop from the eight we had. If your name wasn't drawn from the hat, then you were stuck using the desktops. There is a lot of perks to using a laptop in this media class, so your donation is making a huge difference and will benefit us and our work. Thank you! For instance, with the laptops, we can take it home and edit our radios on Audacity and also edit our video projects on Final Cut Pro 10! Speaking of Final Cut Pro 10, last year we had to use Final Cut Pro 7 on the desktops, and there was only 1 laptop with Final Cut Pro 10. Only three people from the class know how to use 10, but now with a laptop for everyone, we all get the opportunity to work and edit with it! Another thing we will use the laptops for is to write our blogs and work on our websites!
Now with a laptop for each student, everyone can take it home and get work finished. In media, you do a lot of work outside of the class. Often times, I'm working on projects after school at home, and on my spare time. So being able to take home laptops and do work, is extremely helpful because we can get things done and be more productive with our time. My partner and I have to work on our radios soon, so we can both edit radios on our separate laptops and take them home to finish. Last year, there was one designated laptop specifically for radios and advisory games and we called it the Radio Laptop. Sometimes, more than one pair of partners had to use the radio laptop so one group would have to wait until the other group was done editing. Being that there was only one laptop to edit radios on, only one of the two partners could edit, and could edit only one radio at a time. But with these laptops, now we can have both partners editing at the same time, editing different radios and helping each other! Therefore, we should be able to get our radios done on time and submit better work because we have more time to edit (since we can edit at home).
In addition to editing our radios with these new laptops, we can also edit our video projects! Our video news story projects are due in the near future and so we have to start editing very soon! Last year, using the desktops, all editing would have to be done in school, meaning during class, at lunch, or after school. But now we can take the laptops home and edit there! I can't stress enough that bringing a laptop home will benefit me, my partner, and the class so much. Having our own laptop to borrow and use will extend our editing time by a lot so chances are, our video will be better and have little editing mistakes since we have all this time to edit. And the best part about editing our news story projects on the laptops is that the laptop has Final Cut Pro 10 on it! I was looking over Final Cut 10 and it is much better and improved from Final Cut 7. There are A LOT more features on Final Cut 10 that will help make our video the best it can be. Only 3 people from the media class knew how to use it, but Mr. M has provided us with tutorial videos on how to use it, so everyone will get the chance to use this awesome editing program and it's new features!
Another use for the laptops is to write our weekly blogs. Every week we are required to write two blogs a week; one on a topic from Mr. M, and one free-write on something that relates to media. With the laptops in our class, we can work on our websites, designing it and making it look nicer. We can also use them to write our blogs and finish them up at home. Bringing them home means more time to work on our websites and blogs, thus, more effort will be put into them.
Uncle Toyo and the Murayama Ohana, from myself and the class, thank you so much for your extremely generous donation to our class. Your donation will benefit our class and make a huge difference. Because of you, we will be more productive and make more use of our time. It allows us to take home and borrow the laptops, edit our radios and videos, use final cut 10 and design our website and write our blogs! Thank you so much!
Sincerly,
Alaysia Navor