Edexcel DiDA Unit 1 help!

Not very relevant but i spent a two years doing the DiDa course which involed 4 units. I spent months and months on it and was really stressed out, only to find that most colleges dont even accept it. So my advice to you is dont spend drastic amount of time on any of the units

No way? Don't tell me I've wasted two of my options for nothing...

There is so little actual ICT in the unit that I only had to ask for help for a couple of things; mostly what is being assessed is your planning and organisation of a huge pointless project (which I obviously didn't do - what I did was cover two years worth of work in two months of lunchtimes and then write my "plan" and my "adapted plan" to make it look like I was really well organised over two years).
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Whoa, thanks! Yeah, I had a meeting type thing with my teacher last week as my project hadn't been marked yet . It's obvious that you can't keep to the 30 hour time limit, so my plan isn't exactly what I did. He mentioned the "adapted plan", what exactly do you have to do for it and where can you gain marks from plan related stuffs?
Out of curiosity...what grade did you get?

I got distinction

Basically you make your original plan eg:

5th September: Research project
7th September: Research stuff about project
15th September: Construct basic e-portfolio
19th September: Decide on and implement layout for e-portfolio

And so on (but with slightly more detail)...

Then next to it you can make another column (or use annotations, or make another spreadsheet or document, or however you want to lay it out) saying stuff like:

7th September: Goals met
15th September: Took longer than expected to make e-portfolio - plan adapted. Then show how you adapted your plan.

This shows how you can adapt to unforseen circumstances and still complete the project effectively. (They also like it if every month or so you plan for one hour's homework as "contingency time" where you can catch up on any outstanding work)

My plan was based on the truth of my original plan but obviously I didn't stick to it, so I just made up my "adapted plan".

So did you make sure it fitted into the 30 hour time limit, or is the whole "adapted plan" to show that you didn't work to it?

I did the first unit of DiDA (AiDA) in 2 years. I spent 18 months being taught wrongly by a variety of different teachers in a huge, badly-behaved class before figuring out that all I had to do was go on the website, find the checklist of things to do and make sure that I did them all. There is so little actual ICT in the unit that I only had to ask for help for a couple of things; mostly what is being assessed is your planning and organisation of a huge pointless project (which I obviously didn't do - what I did was cover two years worth of work in two months of lunchtimes and then write my "plan" and my "adapted plan" to make it look like I was really well organised over two years).

I don't mean to mock your qualification - it was important to me while I was doing it, and I understand that you want to do well in it, so good for you. To get a high grade, literally go through the spec and make sure absolutely everything that is on it is done - it is one of the easiest types of qualification in that they just give you all the answers and you just have to go away and put them in a large e-portfolio.

Some tips:
Have some secondary sources and make sure they are acknowledged - if they are copyrighted, email the company asking for permission to use the info/images, then take a screenshot of the (hopefully positive) email you get back (the DiDA peeps seriously love this) - if they are free images, make sure you state that they are free images
Don't worry too much about your planning - get the work done and make up the plan at the end if you have to
Keep the colour schemes in each unit consistent
Take some of your own photos
Obvious stuff like make sure spelling and grammar etc. are good, and that you have a good layout - no curly text, no tiny text, make sure that if you have a specific layout on your page it is the same whether your page is medium size or maximised
Check all links on any e-portfolios
The first time you do a piece of work, don't do it as well as you could - then you will be able to improve it and write about what you have improved and why

Hope this helps, good luck

Wow... precisely like my class. I managed to get thru 3 eportfolios, and one of my friends got thru 10. lucily around christmas of my year 11, my school hired a science technician who taught DiDA b4, as a pilot and as an actual project b4 he retired, and he took us (the guys who bothered to work and not mess around) thru the whole thing.

just make sure there is a theme if you can, not that important if not, but consider SOAP - Sense of Audience and Purpose - if your publications has this, and you have a detailed plan + project log - you're sorted. apparently - i got full marks

i mean overall - this unit 1 should take 30hrs me and my friends calculated that we've actually spent 250hrs + some wasted Quake 3 LAN games in class :P