Well we have finally made it to the end of this long and frustrating journey. The biggest piece of the puzzle is upon us and we are in the throes of trying to successfully tie all of our work together. Wrap it up, put a bow on it and place it under the tree. The big question I guess is how well we have accomplished this. Will it be a Merry Christmas or will the frustration continue? After 15 weeks of fighting with these technologies, but even more so with myself, I will be glad to put this one to bed. I can honestly say that I have learned so much this semester. I have learned many new technologies but I have also learned some new things about myself. I am stronger than I give myself credit for. When all I wanted to do was to quit and crawl under the covers, I stuck it out. When I thought to myself, "I don't understand this, I can't do it!" I presevered and figured it out. Although like everyone else I want the reward for all of my efforts of getting that A I so desperately seek, I realize my reward is my tenacity and my ability to face the unknown and fight back. Whatever the outcome, I am grateful that the challenge that I thought would be my demise as a student has instead allowed me to find my strength and know my worth. Thank you!
 Since I was the only one in the group who had experience with google docs (thank you Cindy Kopp), where we can all go in and edit a document collaboratively, I volunteered to set everything up. Only problem is when I used it, it was already set up for me. Like everything else this semester I realized that I took on another challenge. Fortunately this time I succeeded (Whew!). At least I think I did! I set up a shared document, named it, posted a link to the video and posted a screenshot of my comment on Youtube. Hopefully I will even have someone responding to it. We all agreed on the topic but it was harder to pin down than I thought it would be. The problem was that although there were alot of news reports on the electronic cigarette, there were none that were recent. The bigger problem to that was that most of them had not had any comment activity in months. I found one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04rj9Tl2CV8&feature=related that had comments made in the past week so I chose that. I also thought it would be fairly reputable since it was a report from CNN. My request from you is that in your response, you indicate what postion you are taking in the conversation and let me know how you made out using google docs, for the first time and what challenges you had to deal with. Here's the link to the google doc https://docs.google.com/a/students.rowan.edu/document/d/1OaQYt4EuhBcq_lLwnON694jsYyZX5ygx2IT9VfjJmpA/edit. Have fun!!!
 This is my first blog EVER and I thought I would write about my experience creating the Prezi for the Digital Oral History. I am a non traditional student (that's a nice way of saying old) and I have been forced to learn so many new technologies as a result of returning to school. I have always used office software where I work, but I was not experienced with the presentation softwares. Since most of my classes require some type of presentation I have become proficient at using Power Point and even Photo Shop and Publisher to some degree. When we got this assignment I thought how hard can this be. I had seen Prezi's before, but had never actually created one. I am pretty good at finding my way around new software and getting it to do lots of cool things to make the presentation look better, but this was truly a struggle for me. It took me 8 hours to create the little bit of information that I have in there. I found the software to be difficult to use and without any resources to guide a new user through the process. It was not user friendly at all in my opinion. Additionally when I emailed the videos I took from my Ipad to my computer the files were too large to email as one so I then had to copy each file to Youtube and edit them back together and create new videos. When I finally had the finished product and put it into my Prezi, it would not save in the Prezi. Everytime I thought I had it right, I would go back into the Prezi and it would be gone. It was a very frustrating process and it was probably my biggest breakdown so far, though I'm sure there are many more bigger ones to come. I would be interested to hear what your experience were with the Prezi and if you found it to be as difficult to use as I did or if it just something more easily navigated by a digital native. Look forward to hearing from you!
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