Tools Reflection

We have used various tools in this class throughout the semester some of which were familiar and some of which were new. To begin with, zoom was a new tool which i had to use this semester for my online classes. Zoom was a pretty conventional tool which was used by people all over the world. The positives of this tool was that most times than not it had a good stable connection and did not cut off unlike skype which i had used in the past. Not only that it was very pleasing to use because it was not that much of a hassle and it was not to technical you only needed to login once and then just join the class via the link that was sent, also the accessibility of the tool made it easy to use and it did not have to be accessed from one device. The only thing i did not like about this tool is that midway of using this tool i read an article that stated that zoom was not a secure platform to use and that what was being written in the private chat between two people could be seen by the host of the conference call. Another tool which was new to me was the google sites tool that i used in another class. I did not like the tool that much but i have to say it felt a bit more organised than blackboard. But one of its downsides is that some documents could not be downloaded unless the creator of the site would allow us. For example in that class in order to access the syllabus i had to open the google sites each time and i could not zoom in unless the entire internet window was zoomed in. A third tool/application that was new to me was Slack. Before taking this course i had never heard about slack. i felt like slack was easy to use but i did not feel like it was a great communication tool because it would not notify me if any messages were sent even though the notifications for the application was turned on hence i missed a lot of important messages because of this minor mishap. Fourth platform/website that was is the hypothesis tool. this was the tool that i did not like the most because it was too much of a hassle and was not easy to use at first. For example every time i had to use the platform i had to sign in because it would not save my credentials for some reason and then i would have to login/access the unbound equity group in order to read the articles that were posted, and sometimes when i would annotate the article the highlight or annotation would not post. I feel like something like google docs which enables us to leave comments would have been more efficient to use. Lastly, i used a new tool for networking with other people from the world called thecn.com, its called course networking. At first the site was a bit unfamiliar and tedious to use because we had to set up a new profile for ourselves to be able to communicate with the other members. And also there was a little bit of new stuff which one had to understand about the site in order to use and get familiar with. This website was good because it had served its purpose of allowing us to communicate efficiently with people we have never met before. for example it did not ask us to create a profile using our facebook account which I would have felt uncomfortable to do because the people we were communicating with were complete strangers. Also the one thing i liked about the platform/tool is that every time a member of our classroom or group would comment or post something on the class “wall” it would send us an email notifying us. In the end, the tools that i would use again in the future are slack but i would have to fix this notification issue and zoom for online conferences and meetings.