This quarter for Comm 350, we were asked to keep a blog among other things to get through the class. Some of these other things included: learning photoshop, dreamweaver, indesign, creating our own websites, creating a class book, making business cards and learning about different communication technologies. This class has taught me a lot of different things that are extremely valuable in terms of communicating and even furthering yourself in the business world.
The first thing that I want to talk about learning is photoshop. Some people like this program and find it really easy to use. Personally, I find it really difficult and often times frustrating to work on. There are so many different things that you can do with this program, that you could honestly spend a quarter just learning how to use it and all the different effects that you can create. For this class, we were assigned to do the pages on photoshop then attach them to dreamweaver to make our website. I wish we could have spend more in time class studying this and using it. We just use it for creating our personal website which we didn't spend a whole lot of time in class learning. I think that for future use, now that I know how do do these things I will be more enthusiastic towards it. Because of my lack of experience with these programs I often grew frustrated and went through multiple different designs before deciding on one that I really liked. When I finally decided on my layout, photoshop grew easier to use. I still wish I knew more in terms of different effects, but like I said, photoshop is a program that you could teach for a whole quarter and continually learn from.
For the class we also created a group website through a free online cite. These are a couple of the cites we were able to use :
www.wix.com
www.weebly.com
Personally, my group went with weebly. Upon completion of the website, I learned that wix was slightly easier to use and it also offers way more templates for websites that are free. I personally think it is much cooler than weebly and you can do a lot more things in terms of design. From this class, and other classes I have taken I learned that these are great resources to use if you are looking to create your own website. They are reasonably priced if you would like to pay to have your own domain and super easy to edit.
My group decided to do a website for students at WWU who are 21 and older. It can be found at this web address: http://wwu21plus.weebly.com/. It's informative, we can always go back and edit it and we can add or take away pages if we choose to. Overall, these free websites cites are great for creating fun, informative websites and they are easy to take down if you don't want them up any more.
Overall this quarter what I have learned is the skills that are gained through taking this class and learning these programs are incredibly valuable. Sure we just skim the surface of some of the programs, but overall we learn how to do a little bit of everything. We have created websites from scratch, used free templates on line, created a class book, a podcast, a business card, a brochure and a newsletter. Doing so has opened many doors to what we may be asked to do during employment or in future classes. Also for this class we were required to keep a blog, a weekly blog. This may not be as easy as one may think. Sure it is easy to blog about your experiences but to update it every week can become difficult when you are competing with life. Postsecret is a great blog that is consistently updated every Sunday. The reason I mention this blog is because, it is one of the only blogs I follow because it is consistently updated every week, and it is always interesting. That is another difficult thing about a blog, keeping it interesting. It can be difficult to keep a blog about Emerging Communications Technology interesting for everyone but that's the beauty of a blog....not everyone has to like it.
