EDCI 505

I have been using Google Docs (now Google Drive) for a while now. I was introduced to it during my undergrad when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. My friends and I used it to edit story lines and to keep track of various information.

During my World of Warcraft playing days, the same group of friends used it to keep track of Guild inventory, Darkemoon Faire cards, trinkets, and gear scores for raids. We also had a spread sheet with a ranking system (much like a database!) for various players that we had to pick up for our weekly raids.

Recently, I've been using it for many group projects for the Bachelor's Plus program.

It was really fun teaching myself the inner workings of formulas for the spreadsheets. If you read this, Dr. Nelson, you might want to think about a YouTube video on how to write simple f(x). I had to look some of the stuff up. The videos provided were helpful for everything that I wanted to do, but the functions.

The Google Forms I knew existed, but I wasn't too familiar with it. It's an awesome tool if you are not familiar with Word Document formatting or quick review/quiz set-up. The answer choices are a little limited though. I wanted my students to write in a time period (17th - 18th century), but unless I made the question a fill-in-the-blank, I couldn't really do it. It would have been nice if the date feature just let you type in dates. I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a social studies person. Also, the way to get the appropriate date was a little silly and difficult.

I don't really have anything good to say about PowerPoint. I think it is a really dated presentation media for a few reasons. The first is that there are so many differences from version to version and none of them are compatible with each other. It is also super expensive. I'm running 2003 on my laptop and it is so compatible with the newest version that they are two completely different programs. Another huge issue is that it is made by Microsoft, a good company but they also own Internet Explorer, which no one uses anymore even Ashland University. This is a huge compatibility issue for the embedding capabilities of Power Point. I first attempted to finish up the assignment on the school computer, but I had a huge problem with embed codes and Adobe Flash working with outdated Internet Explorer. I talked to some tech people and they informed me that the university would not be updating the plug in for the browser, meaning that anything you try to embed will have an error. This process is completely different than the 2003 embedding. With 2003 you have to know what you are doing, taking out the right pieces of code and pasting it in a tiny little box in a very long list, and then if you use the presentation on another computer, the codes disappear. (Experience from a previous class.) So PowerPoint can be used simply, but there are just too many factors with presentations if they are not kept simple or on the same computer they were created on. With sites like Prezi, it is just becoming obsolete.