Practitioner Development

I feel that I do not purposely go out to improve my practitioner development day by day, I think that it happens in everyday activities and it happens without me even realising it. One prime example of this is when I’m listening to music on my ipod, and even more when I’m downloading new music on the computer. I feel that this is useful in many ways, because when I create a project, say for university, which requires a soundtrack I usually manage to think of a perfect fitting soundtrack to add to it, from my music collection. Therefore, I feel that it is important to keep up to date with music as it can always come in useful, most importantly to develop skills. For example, my one shot video required a song which dragged on to portray awkwardness, the song Zorba the Greek immediately popped into my head. I had this ion my music collection, and I had originally discovered the song from a television advert.

Therefore Watching TV is also a useful way of developing practitioner skills. Television adverts express many different methods of getting a message across to an audience, and this is very useful for a Multimedia student like myself. Many adverts nowadays are animated and as of recent many cars companies have expressed their cars in extravagant ways using animation. The methods used are often useful to use in my own independent projects, as their ideas seem to be fresh and new and very useful.

One other method of developing skills is actually making products. On a couple of occasions, I have been asked to create a website for two different organisations. This is a form of independent learning because I had to create a website for the first time all by myself without the help of teachers, tutors and other pupils. I used the internet to develop my skills on creating the websites; online flash tutorials helped me in many ways. This method was probably the most beneficial for me as it helped me create the perfect animations for the websites I created. All the animations I found were free, and accessible to all, which also made life a lot easier.

One final example of independent study is when my younger brother requires help from me with his ICT A-Level work. This has happened many times when he asks me questions that I do not have the answer to, mainly when using flash. However we both try to solve the problem, mainly with trial and error when using flash, or many times we have looked on the online tutorials. This is not independent learning as in the sense of me working on my own, but I feel that it easily fits into the category of me developing my practitioner skills.