By Liz Meyer

The prompt for this assignment was mainly focused on incorporating multimedia tools and technology to convey a message. The message we chose was to spread awareness of the increasing severity of cyber bullying. Children are committing suicide after being cyber bullied, and we want to supply parents and teachers with resources to help prevent further deaths of young adults. We focused on cyber bullying specifically because it is very different from traditional bullying; children cannot escape their attackers when they come home from school and their attackers are often anonymous. With the rise of constantly available technology, bullies have constant access to their victims through social media, instant messaging, and blogging.

We wanted to incorporate a page dedicated to teachers because they see students just as often as the parents do. Teachers can make an important difference in the prevention of bullying while the child is at school and need to know the different tools they have at their disposal. Through our site we hope that both parents and teachers will find some useful tips and signs of how to identify bullying that will help protect the children in their lives. We designed an interactive website to make it more appealing and easy to find information that can help many people.

We faced many challenges when it came to the design of the website; how to organize the information in the format that was best for the users took us the longest. Our organization focuses on catching people’s attention with our video and the stories page, and then making people realize there are many ways they can make a difference. The video took the most time out of the entire project because we needed to film and edit a lot of different aspects. We learned how many skills are truly needed to make a video that includes footage, graphics, music, and transcriptions. Making it all cohesive and creative was difficult. While creating this website we learned how serious a problem cyber bullying is in our country, and we hope we will be able to spread this message. As a society, we need to take strong steps toward creating a climate of acceptance in our schools. We hope to help parents and teachers take this step through our multimedia website.