Course Reflections

This course helped me to understand free tools that are available and so useful to the things I do everyday. I have had to make presentations for things before and the whole time I wondered, why would anyone bother with this it is so boring. What is the point even, this format is so tired and no one will pay attention anyway. But this course showed me other ways that really have made it possible to bump up my game. I already used Prezi to make a presentation for a wine and Cheese Pairing class that I do with a friend, and he was floored. Took it back to all of his buddies at Cabot and they could not believe how great it looked compared to the silly old things they used to use. I also got over my skepticism of Could services. I love them now. I got a new computer half way through the semester and realized that this way I can just transfer everything to google photos and access it from my phone or tablet as well. It is really a Brave new world. I also met with plenty of the Usual frustrations that I always feel when working with technology. Sometimes I feel like in the pursuit for everything to be streamlined they make it very hard to use. None the less I am very pleased to have learned and feel as though I can further my learning in the area of Computers and Technology.

Final Project

Prezi's

This week we learned about Prezi's. I can not wait to use this system for work. It will make wine tastings so much more educational. I think I maybe have the whole Embed code thing figured out. So that is awesome! I feel like I am making progress. It is amazing how each thing I have been learning in this class I have gone on to use in my daily life, I have even been teaching my boyfriend some things and he is techie. The one thing I wish I could have done with the template was to crop the pictures with different shapes. It seems like you had to use the template that had that going already. Anyone have any pointers about that?

Presentations

This week we delved deeper into making presentations.  I am so grateful to be learning these things.  I have struggled for so long with many aspects of computers, and actually being able to do things more quickly and like I know what I am doing is really fantastic.  As simple as learning that you can select one thing, hold the shift key and click the last thing, and it selects them all, is frankly kind of life changing.  I still struggle with the design of things.  I have a way in my head and I just feel as though I am not quite creative enough to get past my limitations.  I am good at picking subjects for projects that I really like, but creating what I want is still far fetched for me.   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YxEnL8JG5H95ShUt-LE2cWPkuo6iSstJfglWfd3JyqU/htmlpresent

Google Slide about Food

Photo editing is really enjoyable

This week we learned about photo editing and tools.  This was a great opportunity for me to deal with many photos that have been sitting around on my computer, needing to have something done with them.  The slideshow I made has photos from my work trip in Austria.  We spent five days learning about Austria and the wine there, as well as meeting the people that make the wine that I am so fortunate to sell. These people showed a group of fifteen an amazing amount of hospitality, and truly made us fall in love with their country and their wine.  I enjoyed putting together this slide show, because I will use it for work as well as this class, and it was very nice to have the memories come flooding back to me. 
  I am again very happy with the practicality of the tools and things we are learning in this class.  It is just as I had hoped it would be in terms of updating me with the information that I need to catch up in the world today.  

Learning about Austrian Wine

https://youtu.be/8M9nFC9fxuM

My computer is very very old.

This week I struggled with my very old computer. The screen kept shutting off when I was trying to do things. Then I got it to work again and It told me I needed Google Chrome to use some of these applications. When I tried to download Google Chrome is seems to think that my computers system is to old for it to work. So in a nut shell I was challenged this week. I had no problems creating the Audio clips, and I thought both of those platforms were very good for that. For my purposes, I would choose Twisted Wave. It is simple and to the point. That is currently my style when using computers and such, so I felt it was everything you need and nothing you don't. I did however have a terrible time getting it to save or be transferred to google drive. So I can not seem to upload anything. I would love some feedback on this, it would be nice to know what to do. I feel as though I was able to do all the activities this week, but I was not able to share any of it. Did anyone else experience difficulty there? It looked so easy in the video! I do enjoy how easy it is to loop everything in with your google account. I can not stand having to create a new profile for every little thing, so this is a feature I can get behind!I have never had a youtube channel, but I have a bunch of videos so this will be fun to use. They are mostly dumb videos of my pets, but those get watched for sure. I hope this week goes more smoothly, and if there are any tricks I missed in terms of getting the files to actually upload or be saved to google drive, please pass them along!

Twisted Wave Hemmingway Quote

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2glHbq_jUGfNkZmQVNrXzl4QXM

Challenges continute to abound in Week 5

 

There were a few rainbows in the CLOUD this week

Many of the tools we are using are very handy for all sorts of things.  My favorite one of this week, was the research tool in the google document.  I really enjoy how user friendly it is.  There is not a bunch of junk I have to sort through, of tabs I have to go back and forth from.  It is all just there, as convenient as can be. 

Now as for the Microsoft 365,  I am going to be a little harsh here, but that is the most horrible thing I have tried to navigate through in a long time.  I tried to set up a computer for my mother with a similar interface, and I did not have the patience.  For me personally, it may as well have been in Greek.  First of all you need other people to be using Sharepoint to share things with them.  That is just plain an outdated thing to do.  Documents should be shareable easily with many different recipients, regardless of what system they are using.   Another gripe I had with this was that each time I tried to click on something to take me somewhere, a second screen popped up telling me to go here, or log into this other account.  I can see why that would happen, all one account, that last thing I need is any more account information or passwords to remember.  Now I will say that I spent a total of an hour on both this class and helping my mother try to use this platform.  I think maybe if you were used to it you could overcome, but for me I will stick with what I know, unless there is something extra special that only they can provide me with. 

 

Feeling I had when using Microsoft 365

I thought I did not even use the cloud that much, then I opened the driver to find that I have hundreds of documents on it!  I think it is what happens when I look at them in my Gmail.  I am glad to know they are all there, and I feel inspired to clean some things off my computer and not be afraid I will never see it again.  It is hard to trust digital things for me, but I am going to make a point to work on it. 

Design is important to catch a readers attention and not bore them to death. I am really good at envisioning what I want things to look like, and much worse at making that happen.

So we all can see that design is an important part of how you present the facts, opinions and such that you post on in your blog. And I think we can all agree that it can make or break your readership, I mean who wants to waste a sunny day messing around trying to get information from your blog and being so confused that they just leave? I hate it when I get sent to a page or blog and end up going down a rabbit hole, it instantly makes me angry, and I go find the info elsewhere.

 I am a little frustrated with designing my own blog. I am not sure if it is me or blogger, but I feel like all I can do is make it look ordinary. Customize is hardly customizable. It is just templates. I want to add my own pictures and flair. If anyone has any tips I would love to hear about them!

 The 45 excellent blog designs article said this "it also has to be able to build some kind of a bridge between the content and its presentation." So this is a big deal to me about the blogs I liked that I saw. There was some type of photo or obvious eye catcher that brought you to the content, much like tasting wine at the winery, it sets the tone and changes the romance level of the information you are going to be taking in. It really "ties the room together", and puts your mind in the right place to bring in the content. To me it also seems important to brand yourself somehow. If only with a logo, you must make yours stand out somehow, and appeal to the desired audience. Are you writing about gardening? You should probably have a color scheme that makes sense there, like earthy browns and greens rather than red. Like the 5 Key's article said, you have 5 seconds to make a visual impression!

 He also gives you this handy table:

 red – increases the heart rate; draws attention orange – communicates youthfulness and action yellow – increases energy and inspires cheerfulness green – easiest color for the eye to process; encourages relaxation and growth blue – associated with trustworthiness and authority black – elegance, style, strength white – balance, cleanliness, and purity

 I have to talk myself out of this all the time, personally red is my favorite color, so I have to talk my self out of using it for everything. I also agree about the fonts, people use them like they are the only ones that know about them. There are a bunch of places you can download cooler fonts from.

That is good advise about underlining things, I had not ever thought about that. But he is correct, I would certainly assume something underlined was a link. Most of the website building platforms looked similar in what they could do. The ones that stood out to me for different reasons were WordPress, if nothing else, they do have a shocking amount of sites built through them. So that alone leads me to the logic that they will always be improving and changing things. They also seem to be very versatile, anything from a little old blog to an eCommerce site. Weebly seems good if you are intending to sell things from your site, you get some free Google ad space, but they take 3% of your profits, but they do offer lots of tools like inventory for free. Cargo was cool, I did not know about it before. It is an artist site maker that you have to apply for or be invited to. That is an interesting way to keep the mainstream at bay. Wix to me seems like the most user friendly and flexible. The pay part had 8 different package options, so it seemed easiest to get what you needed from the service at a price that worked for you.

 Social media wise, I have had accounts with most of these. I do appreciate how they are all different. Facebook has become the one you have to be "good" on, because your parents and boss and aunts and uncles are all on there these days. But I do have to say I enjoy the layout the most. I like that I can customize the settings so easily. I also enjoy instagram, because it is simple, just pictures with a bit of text, less complaining and the like. Twitter is also pretty quick and too the point, just a sentence or two and a link shared. I have to say that google plus is far and away my least favorite thing. It is so clunky and confusing, I just can't stand it. I am trying to find peace though.

Fair Use and Copyright

This week we have been discussing Fair use and Copyright. This is a really interesting subject that I really did not know to much about. I think this applies the most to my life with work currently. When selling wine you have to do tastings and make up tech sheets and shelf talkers and such. There are usually trade specific pages that wineries will allow you to use, but they are typically not available to be used by the public. Otherwise anyone could just use the images I suppose. I have also had an interesting situation happen to me when I was managing a restaurant that sometimes had live music. There is an organization called ASCAP that deals with music rights. I did not know that was a thing, until I started getting phone calls. People would come and play at our restaurant on Thursday night, and sometimes these people would be recorded and posted up on YouTube. The people at ASCAP have a fleet of humans that spend their days searching YouTube for songs of Musicians they are representing. Now if that song was played at your bar you may have to give them some money. I ended up not having to deal with them, but it seemed really interesting that this was something that was being enforced by an organization.

Just checking to see if this works!