To Conclude GEN2243f18

As the semester comes to an end, I can’t help but to look back and reflect on the various things I’ve learned. When the school year started, I was extremely intimidated. I felt as if the work asked of us was confusing and complex. However, after the first week, I became accustomed to the work load. I was not scheduled to be in this course from the start, which made me fall behind from the rest of the students in the class. I was not particularly fond of the idea of creating a Twitter for my major and updating it/ posting on it daily. However, as the semester went on I started to understand professors Calderwood’s method to his madness. He wanted us to create a personal learning network for ourselves. Posting about your career on social media is an easy way to network and potentially, get offered job opportunities. Unlike many other classes, this class is one that each and every college student can benefit from. I’ve learned that social media is a crucial part of job interviews. You must be careful of what you post on social media, your’e digital footprints follow you forever.

This course consisted of assignments such as app smackdowns, and presentation slides. The app smackdowns were 3 presentations where we were asked to find an app related to our major and present it for a few short minutes. The point of this was too get used to presenting in front of the class for our midterm and final presentations. At first, my hands were very shaky when I presented, but by the time midterms came around I was more than comfortable presenting in front of the people around me. Every week in class we would learn about a new software, website or app that we could use to our advantage. Some of things we learned about were, Paper.li, OneNote, LinkedIn and Pwned. We were also shown different presentations tools such as, Haiku Deck, Prezi, Google Slides, Powerpoint, and Sway. Pixton, Animoto, Adobe Spark and Powtoon are video creation services that Professor Calderwood showed us as well. We learned about google cardboard, the merge cube, Hololens, and mixed reality. To conclude the semester we were shown tools to created our website for our final. These tools were, Wix and Weebly. These tools were used to do assignment such as, create a Onenote account Paper.li account, and a LinkedIn profile. We had to create a video commercial using one of the platforms provided, along with a Halloween presentation using one of the presentation tools provided. For our midterm we had to find a situation where a social media post ruined a persons career/ got them fired. This assignment was interesting because it made us see that everything we were learning was serious, and that social media seriously has the potential to ruin someones career.

A huge part of our semester were the blogs we created and the books we had to read for homework. Each week were asked to write a blog that reflected on the material we learned in class, and pick three livebinders based on that to write about. Livebinders were the articles posted weekly that related to what we learned in class. Along with this, we need to reflect on the paragraph(s) we were asked to read for homework that week. The books we read were, lol...OMG, Untangling the Web, and Light, Bright and Polite. Each of these books had to do with social media etiquette/ what to post & what not to post. Of these three books, my favorite book was, lol..OMG. Although, this book was repetitive it offered a lot of useful advice for students and young adults on the use of social media.

Everything I’ve learned in this class is valuable and will help me through the next few years of college. In my opinion, one of the most valuable things we learned was about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awesome site used to find job opportunities and to connect with others in your field. I plan to use this website in the future as a source to find jobs and post about my potential as an employee.

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed this class and the information we learned. I liked that the class was so small, allowing each of us to get to know one another. If I had to go back in time, I would definitely still take this class all over again. I am happy that I transferred out of my other course and enrolled in Exploring my Digital Portfolio. It has truly been a great semester!