Impressions - Technology Available

The idea of blogging here on Blogger for the class didn't sound appealing at first, but it basically serves the same purpose as Canvas while allowing us to customize our blogs with our own designs. So I guess that's cool; it beats Canvas anyways. As for website publishing, that doesn't sound too hard since it's through Google. Initially I thought we were going to have to use HTML, which wouldn't have been too difficult either, but Google tends to make all of their services easy to operate.

Bookmarking is something I might as well start doing for this class. I typically only bookmark websites that I know I'll forget after a few minutes, but with this class I just keep finding the link to the class wiki through Canvas. Bookmarking would cut out the extra step of logging into Canvas. Text-to-speech readers give me mixed feelings. On one hand, they sound super convenient since it means I can relax my eyes and just listen to the words on the page. On the other hand, the monotonous voices of things like Siri and Microsoft Sam put me to sleep. I'll keep the idea in the back of my mind, but I doubt I'll realistically use any text-to-speech readers.

The Course Announcements Blog sounds really helpful. I always appreciate having reminders about what's due or what's coming up. The Center for Academic Support is something I have never bothered with. English is my strongest subject since I plan on majoring in Creative Writing, so I've never felt the need to ask for help from there regarding any reading or writing assignments. The LMC library is something I try to avoid. It's not because it's bad or anything like that. It's efficient. It's just that I dislike the idea of using library research databases. The nature of these databases are always restrictive as to what you can realistically expect to find. It's also somewhat annoying to have to constantly log back into the database when it inevitably logs you out after 5 minutes while you're still looking for other articles to use in whatever research paper you're working on. I'd much rather stick to using Google if possible, but the LMC library at least gets the job done if I'm forced to use it.

Google Docs makes me wonder why my family has bothered paying for Microsoft Word as long as they have. Google docs is a lot less tedious than Microsoft Word. It's free and doesn't bother you about product keys. It also lets you access all of your documents without the need for a flash drive, so long as you can remember your login info of course.