Twitter
I'd learned how to use Twitter in one of my other writing courses, but that doesn't mean I love Twitter. Sometimes it's irritating to have only 140 characters, but I can appreciate how the smaller character requirement works well for class. If I had to tweet about anything, it was usually a quick question, or a short comment about my surroundings for my Twitterive. I never needed 420 characters like I have on Facebook. Another thing I didn't like about Twitter was the news feed. It's hard to tell who is replying to what and when. On Facebook, you post something and the comments about it are lined up underneath the post. Honestly, I stopped checking Twitter after my Twitterive was written and I don't plan on continuing to use it. But I can appreciate the quick, on-the-go purpose of Twitter.
Weebly
I might continue using this weebly site for personal writing purposes. I say "might" only because I already have a site that I use strictly for my creative fiction works, but even that one I forget I have sometimes. Perhaps I could keep this site for my nonfiction work (which I don't write much of anyway.) I can't say for sure if I'll actually use the site, but I'm certainly not going to delete it. I've done too much work on it. It was fun picking the pictures at the top of each page, and I've written so much for the course on this website. I just can't bear to throw it in the (virtual) trash.
I really like how the different elements that you can use to create the site is in plain sight at the top of the page, I didn't have to go looking for how to make a space for a paragraph or a Youtube video like I do on Tumblr. I loved how easy it was to upload a Youtube video and how easy it is to put links in. The biggest problem I have with Weebly is that you have to remember to click "Publish" or else someone will go to your site and not see anything, even if you've spent hours typing, for example, an entire reflective letter.
Blogging
I've discussed blogging already in the "writing" part of this reflective letter, and I've talked about Weebly in the paragraphs directly above. They are interrelated because the course blog is on Weebly. The only thing I would add is I thought it was weird that adding a blog is similar to adding a new page. I thought that maybe it would be an icon option on the "elements" tab that you could drag down and create a blog. So in the beginning of the semester when I couldn't find the blog icon, I just used the "paragraph with title" because I didn't realize that I had to click the "pages" tab and then click create blog. I do like the blog setup because it shows the date of the post, and I remember how I thought it was strange that the computer wasn't doing that on its own. I had to type the date into the title box, which was a very minor inconvenience, but I don't like to be inconvenienced.
Youtube
The only part of Youtube that I needed for this course was to upload the video of the interviews into my Oral History tab. I didn't have to record the interviews because that was Laura's part of the project, nor did I upload the resulting videos to Youtube because Froy was the resident tech genius, but I heard that it was all very time consuming. I did do the easy part, which was putting the videos onto my site, which took less than a minute. What I did was drag down two "two column layout" box so that I could get the videos to sit next to each other neatly on the page, then I clicked on multimedia and dragged down four "Youtube Video" icons and placed them inside the four halves of the two column layout. A demo video pops up with a creepy, silver-eyed guy staring at me and scowling.....Then I went to my Rowan email, where I saved the links to the videos from when Laura sent them out to us, I copied and pasted the urls into the box that pops up when you click the demo video, and pressed enter on my keyboard and the interview videos appeared in the box.
File Formats
Thankfully, I wasn't the one in my group who had to upload the interview audio from the recording devices to Youtube. We included our surveys in our final collaborative research paper, but Froy uploaded the scans of the surveys onto Dropbox, then he invited me, I accepted, and uploaded the files onto Weebly.
I'd learned how to use Twitter in one of my other writing courses, but that doesn't mean I love Twitter. Sometimes it's irritating to have only 140 characters, but I can appreciate how the smaller character requirement works well for class. If I had to tweet about anything, it was usually a quick question, or a short comment about my surroundings for my Twitterive. I never needed 420 characters like I have on Facebook. Another thing I didn't like about Twitter was the news feed. It's hard to tell who is replying to what and when. On Facebook, you post something and the comments about it are lined up underneath the post. Honestly, I stopped checking Twitter after my Twitterive was written and I don't plan on continuing to use it. But I can appreciate the quick, on-the-go purpose of Twitter.
Weebly
I might continue using this weebly site for personal writing purposes. I say "might" only because I already have a site that I use strictly for my creative fiction works, but even that one I forget I have sometimes. Perhaps I could keep this site for my nonfiction work (which I don't write much of anyway.) I can't say for sure if I'll actually use the site, but I'm certainly not going to delete it. I've done too much work on it. It was fun picking the pictures at the top of each page, and I've written so much for the course on this website. I just can't bear to throw it in the (virtual) trash.
I really like how the different elements that you can use to create the site is in plain sight at the top of the page, I didn't have to go looking for how to make a space for a paragraph or a Youtube video like I do on Tumblr. I loved how easy it was to upload a Youtube video and how easy it is to put links in. The biggest problem I have with Weebly is that you have to remember to click "Publish" or else someone will go to your site and not see anything, even if you've spent hours typing, for example, an entire reflective letter.
Blogging
I've discussed blogging already in the "writing" part of this reflective letter, and I've talked about Weebly in the paragraphs directly above. They are interrelated because the course blog is on Weebly. The only thing I would add is I thought it was weird that adding a blog is similar to adding a new page. I thought that maybe it would be an icon option on the "elements" tab that you could drag down and create a blog. So in the beginning of the semester when I couldn't find the blog icon, I just used the "paragraph with title" because I didn't realize that I had to click the "pages" tab and then click create blog. I do like the blog setup because it shows the date of the post, and I remember how I thought it was strange that the computer wasn't doing that on its own. I had to type the date into the title box, which was a very minor inconvenience, but I don't like to be inconvenienced.
Youtube
The only part of Youtube that I needed for this course was to upload the video of the interviews into my Oral History tab. I didn't have to record the interviews because that was Laura's part of the project, nor did I upload the resulting videos to Youtube because Froy was the resident tech genius, but I heard that it was all very time consuming. I did do the easy part, which was putting the videos onto my site, which took less than a minute. What I did was drag down two "two column layout" box so that I could get the videos to sit next to each other neatly on the page, then I clicked on multimedia and dragged down four "Youtube Video" icons and placed them inside the four halves of the two column layout. A demo video pops up with a creepy, silver-eyed guy staring at me and scowling.....Then I went to my Rowan email, where I saved the links to the videos from when Laura sent them out to us, I copied and pasted the urls into the box that pops up when you click the demo video, and pressed enter on my keyboard and the interview videos appeared in the box.
File Formats
Thankfully, I wasn't the one in my group who had to upload the interview audio from the recording devices to Youtube. We included our surveys in our final collaborative research paper, but Froy uploaded the scans of the surveys onto Dropbox, then he invited me, I accepted, and uploaded the files onto Weebly.