International Orientation PDF
Penny-Lynne Sebert
New Plymouth Girls' High School
Year 13 Digital Technologies
One year project
Teacher: Melinda Stevenson
As a former international student, Penny-Lynne had first-hand experience of the difficulties overseas students can face when entering an entirely new school and culture. Discovering that the numbers of international students at New Plymouth Girls' High School had been declining, Penny decided to create an innovative interactive PDF for her Year 13 Digital Technologies class to help promote and give useful information on the school and the Taranaki region for potential students and their parents overseas.
Penny-Lynne's first step was to approach the head of the international department at New Plymouth Girls' to gather information on the issue and work out the best possible solution. Penny eventually decided on an interactive PDF for its ease of use and accessibility across multiple platforms. The ability for a PDF to be easily saved on a computer and viewed without internet access if necessary also had advantages, while having an impact and level of interactivity absent in printed material.
"When coming to a foreign country, the transition is a hard one to make. With an interactive PDF, students are able to learn about the school and the surrounding area via a digital interactive journey. This enhances their sense of 'knowing' where they are going and the transition is easier for both the family and the student," says Penny-Lynne.
To make a professional product that would serve the school as an introduction and all-round support pack for her target audience, Penny-Lynne knew she would have to learn a lot, both in skills and knowledge. She started research immediately to find the right textual content, the best design elements to present that information in a visually appealing way and the software she would have to learn to take turn these ideas into a successful outcome.
For the textual content, Penny-Lynne looked at past and present records of the number and nationality of the school's international students as well as contacting international agencies who deal with overseas students, which gave Penny-Lynne important insight into her key audience.
"It became obvious that after China reduced its enrolments due to bad publicity from language schools there was a need to appeal to Asian countries, as they were the main group of international students attending New Plymouth Girls'," Penny-Lynne explains.
Penny also talked to international students who had been through, or were currently experiencing, the transition from another culture, to get ideas on the essential material she would need. Penny-Lynne also asked these students to test the usability and clarity of the PDF's materials and gauge the visual appeal of its design elements throughout the project. Feedback from these students informed her design choices throughout and this testing also added valuable quality assurance as the girls were able to report back if any new elements weren't functioning well.
For the design elements, Penny-Lynne took inspiration and ideas by analysing other interactive PDFs as well as websites, magazines and other promotional material around the issue. Putting these ideas into practice proved to be the most time-consuming portion of this project, as Penny had to teach herself how to use the Adobe InDesign application which she found to be one of the "most challenging but rewarding aspects of this project".
While Penny was largely self-taught in using InDesign, she did receive some mentorship and guidance from local designer Ross Bennet from Cause and Effect Design.
"He definitely assisted me with the basics but when he felt that I was capable of finding it myself, he pushed me to explore the program and find my own way around first, which really allowed me to get the initial feel of the software," says Penny-Lynne.
The interactivity of the PDF took the form of two videos: one supplied by the Venture Taranaki Trust, a regional development agency; and another made by Penny-Lynne using photos supplied by internationally recognised Taranaki photographer Rob Tucker.
"Rob invited me in for an interview and once we had established the focus for my project, he granted me rights to use any images from his portfolio free of charge," says Penny-Lynne.
To make her video truly representative of New Zealand, Penny-Lynne used local music for the soundtrack with a short introduction taken from Ora Mate's song Kamate which Penny-Lynne kept to just under ten seconds to avoid copyright infringement. The rest of the soundtrack was provided by Auckland band Midnight Youth and was incorporated cleverly with the images from Rob Tucker into an image movie using IMovie software.
"Gaining copyright permission from Rob Tucker for the photographs and Midnight Youth for their song Learning to fall was a great privilege and a significant step toward the successful completion of my solution," says Penny-Lynne.
However, Penny-Lynne soon found that a major drawback of feature-rich PDFs was the increasing size of the document. For her own video, Penny-Lynne added an external link to an mp4 file, which left the overall size of the PDF at 200MB, far too big for Penny-Lynne's purposes especially as she wanted quick load times for slower or older computers and easy access for areas where high speed internet access may be limited.
"So I batch-processed all the images in the video so that they were compressed to suit my exact specifications," explains Penny-Lynne. "I also optimised each separate PDF file, which is the process of compressing the layout, designs and embedded information to a more suitable file size."
While Penny would have liked more time to make the PDF even smaller to improve loading times she is extremely pleased with the outcome, which offers a unique solution to an important issue for her school.
"I am proud to say that I created an exciting, informative and entertaining interactive PDF for international students. I believe my solution is an innovative way for schools to use digital technology to effectively market themselves, as it can be viewed on any computer, no matter what the platform, modem or CPU," says Penny-Lynne. "I also taught myself a new piece of software and the possibilities of applying the skills I learnt are endless."
Penny-Lynne also found that the response from the people involved in the project was extremely supportive, with the mayor of New Plymouth providing a personal introduction to the PDF and New Plymouth Girls' High school now using the interactive PDF to promote the school to potential international students.
Penny-Lynne received a 2009 New Zealand Scholarship in Technology for this project and is currently studying Information Science with a minor in Management at Otago University.
Teacher comment
Having Penny create this interactive PDF was a great opportunity for not only New Plymouth Girls' but the Taranaki region as well. Penny-Lynne's solution has put both the school and the area into the international spotlight and shown what we have to offer to the world market, which I think is fantastic. This project provided many challenges for Penny-Lynne which required her to think 'outside the box,' to find creative solutions to the issues she faced and to constantly keep in touch with the wider stakeholders. The nature of this project also enabled Penny-Lynne to call on her own experiences around being an international student and the personal journey she travelled to become a New Zealand citizen."
RSS Feed
