My final blog

From my first blog, to my final one I have made many mistakes but learned a lot from them. Learning to blog in the first place was overwhelming and on top of that, to learn all these other social medias, well I don't know how I did it. The first assignment was blogging and I think it was by far the easiest assignment once I actually figured out how to do it. Its nice to know that you can just type and type and say anything you want, sort of like a stream of consciousness. Also I can choose who sees my blogs and don't feel as though I have to sensor what I say to the extent that I do for Facebook. For the second week we learned how to use Wiki's and I'm still not sure I really know how to use them. After finishing my final project I have learned a lot more about Wikispace's, but still couldn't teach anyone how to use it. The Wiki was a great idea for group projects and really made sense because the teacher can see who does what work and therefore a group project can't be one sided. I definitely think I would want to use the website for more projects during school but think that it would be easier with just one page rather than all the ones we needed to create. Week three was Facebook and Twitter which was definitely up my alley. I learned a little more about Facebook but a lot more about Twitter. I have never been a "Tweeter" and still don't think I will be but it was nice to learn how to use the site and my organization used Twitter as a huge source to inform the public through. I never realized that Twitter could be used not only to follow celebrities but also to follow different organizations. The next week we learned about RSS feeds and I personally hated this assignment. It was cool to have one website with all the different social medias together but I didn't like how hard it was to navigate and also you still have to search this one website to view the others. It was similar to my GMail account which helped make the navigating easier but it still wasn't easy enough. Week number five was to create a podcast and I think I laughed the entire time I did this assignment. It was funny listening to myself and talking to a blank screen but in the end I didn't think utilizing podcasts would help me in school or in my career. It was interesting though because it was the only media tool which involved sound so far and was much like a blog only instead of typing you could talk. For the final week we did Flickr.com and YouTube. YouTube is a website I visit almost at least once a day but I never knew the amount of things you could do for it. I had never created a profile or created playlists on that profile which I liked because it made it easier to remember which videos you have watched and liked. Flickr wasn't as exciting though, I have put my photos online on Walmart.com to print them offf and Flickr reminded me of this. The thing that I liked about it was it allowed you to create an album, look at it any time, and share the album, much like Facebook allows you to do. Overall I learned a lot from this assortment of media tools. I not only learned how it helps me and can help me in my career but also to how it can promote organizations.
Personally I think that in my professional career not many of these sites will be utilized other than Facebook. But, with our generation the way it is with technology I wouldn't be surprised if many of these websites because everyday uses. If this happens I think that RSS or Blogs would be the most common. The only reason I think RSS would be popular is because you are able to type in a keyword to search all articles on the internet. These articles could be geared towards teaching me things in my profession. I could also see blogs becoming a part of daily life in my profession because different physical therapists all around the world can communicate and express concerns online with each other.
If I had to teach this class myself I would change the time restrictions put on assignments. For people working full time it was very difficult to keep up with deadlines. I had to check each website every day to make sure a new assignment wasn't posted so giving out a syllabus with what is due when and giving the assignment on Sunday and having until Sunday to complete it would help because we would only have to check it once. Also it would be easier if there was one place where everything was handed in or just one place to check such as the Facebook page, which made everything a lot easier. Also the articles were very long and boring and didn't really help to tell a lot about the media tool so I would have students find an article because then you know it would be one in which the students would be interested in. Overall the class was very fun and helpful in teaching me about the different uses of media tools.