REFLECTION

Digital Applications was a great course to inform people on all the ways of communication there are out in the world. We are in the the information age with all of the new technology that keeps coming out. This course is a great way for students to stay updated with technology, and what is going on out in the world. College is where we learn who we are, who we want to become, and where we want to go once we finish our studies and reach "the real world". After school, we all will go in separate directions, work for different companies, and start to live our lives independently as adults. Many companies use a variety of technology and programs that differentiate from one another. Digital Applications was a way to teach us, the students the base to all this technology. Blogging, YouTube, Microsoft, Powerpoint, Excel, and creating our own webpages are all this "base" I am referring too. Like I said, companies use different technology. Some companies do stick to just Microsoft Office alone, but others go beyond that. Learning the basics is a way for us to have experience in some way in many different areas. If a company doesn't use Microsoft Office or Blogger specifically, it won't be too hard to adjust to how they do things because we have experience creating powerpoints, excel spreadsheets, word documents etc. All we have to do as employees is adjust to their way of doing things, but learning new things every day whether it is in the workplace or your personal life, is life. Everyone has to start somewhere. There is a strong demand for having computer skills. Nichols College provides their students with the opportunity to gain this knowledge, which is also a great addition to resumes.

Of course the majority of the classroom has used documents such as word and some powerpoint in high school, I know that I did. But, in high school we typed up our papers, and played around with powerpoint as much as we could. This course has furthered our knowledge in these areas, which leads me to one of my "takeaways" from this course. I am a junior, so I have spent a lot of my time typing papers into microsoft word, but these were just papers. I was aware of the formatting palette on the side, but never needed to do anything much more than type the paper, and pass it in. I wasn't familiar with the endless amount of things you can do with one picture including wrapping the image in text, changing styles and effects, changing the backgrounds, changing color, transparency, etc. We learned this through our flyer assignment. I became more knowledgeable on Word, which I plan to use a lot of these skills in future assignments. Using all Word has to offer can differentiate my paper from other students, so that I am very thankful for.
Creating a website would be another one of the bigger things I took from this course. Beforehand, I never knew how to create a website on my own, and I never had an interest. I didn't think I would ever need to know how and wasn't interesting in learning how to because I thought it would be a lot more complicated than it was! How great would it look during an interview if they asked you about your technology skills, and you can say you created a website? In my opinion, I believe this sounds pretty impressive. Will I ever need to create a website? I'm not sure because I am not sure where my career path leads me, but if I didn't have to make one for this site..I would have never learned on my own. This assignment taught me to not always shoot down learning new things. A lot of things throughout life can teach you that when brought into an area outside of your comfort zone. From this assignment I took away not only knowledge of creating a website, but another lesson I hope to follow.

The third "takeaway" from this course for me was blogger. I have never used a blog in my life. I know that it is popular, but it wasn't something I was interested in doing myself. I actually started following a blog myself on my own interests outside of this classroom. I always knew blogging existed, but since I had never done it, I never thought to follow one, or join in on any discussions. I follow a CrossFit blog where I have been able to expand my knowledge on my interests more. There is always more to learn, and blogging is a great way to learn while hear what others have to say. I like that we had to comment on someones blog as well as post our own. If we had to post a blog without having to comment on others, we would not have been able to read about each other and learn about our classmates, because we can all admit, if we did not have to comment on each others posts we most likely would not have taken the time to read multiple posts from each other. (Just being a realist here) Going into a class not knowing anyone, and being able to come out knowing who has been to certain places on vacations and what people are is interesting. It was a way to find out if people have common interests as you. I am a junior in a class with mostly freshman, so I am not walking out with additional friendships, nor was I expecting too. But, I do hope that for some freshman as a learning experience, people who they may have judged in any way or people who they would have never given a chance, I hope some of them can look at each other differently, and who knows leave with a few friendships? Maybe it sounds corny, but I think having blogger incorporated in this course is capable of doing such a thing whether it happened in past classes, our classes, or classes to be held in the future.