Reflection

I am quite surprised how fast this class, and semester went by and cannot believe that I have emerged myself in the blogging and social media world the way I have. ALES 204 has definitely broadened my perspective on the use of social media and online communication, and I would say it is for the better. Social media and the world wide web are useful in so many ways, in saying that you do still need to be a critical observer and remind yourself that you cannot always believe what you read. 


Some highlights of the course for me were the making of our personal blogs (that was an adventure in the formatting and playing around with all the tools), using twitter in a university class (!), grasping how to make poster presentations on powerpoint, the world of pecha kucha presentations, the do's and dont's in public speaking, and all the opportunities for mistakes in email etiquette. 


At times it seemed odd to be learning all of this, because some of it seemed like common sense, but when I actually considered how this could be applied to what my future career is it made a lot of sense to learn these useful skills. The main skills that I will use out of this class for my future job endeavors will most likely be the public speaking and presentation techniques. I will, hopefully, become a teacher with my human ecology combined with education degree and need to understand proper techniques to keep a crowd interested. I will be working with adolescence's, who will obviously not have a massive attention span, or most likely care what I have to say about health education or fashion studies, so interesting presentations will be key in my success. Besides the major emphasis on the presentation techniques I will still use other skills on a daily basis, such as communicating via email with other teachers, parents, and fellow colleagues, along with the use of blogs and social media to actually form lesson plans (especially if I teach any home economics or cooking classes; food blogs!). 


At the end of it all this class has definitely expanded my knowledge with online communication, person-person communication, and social media. Im out for now, have a good summer! 

(Powers, Paige; Versailles, France; 2011.)

Below are the links to the comments I have made on other students blogs, all of the blogs I glanced and browsed around at were very well done and they all made very valid points that contributed to what we have discussed in our lectures and labs.

Comment 1

Comment 2

Comment 3

Comment 4

Comment 5