Technology

Lenovo ThinkPad T60

I have had this laptop for a couple of years now. There was no new technology I used on the laptop itself. I took the laptop to school with me as well as using it as home. This laptop isn’t particularly light so it was quite difficult to carry around. There were a few times (as I mentioned in my previous technology post) that the mouse didn't work so I had to keep restarting it. Due to this it limited the time I had working if I was on a limit, for example in a lesson.

Google.com

This was the only search engine I used through out my coursework. I have always found that this is the fastest and best quality search engine. It was easy to access other sites on it, such as blogger and slide share. I’ve learnt that I should continue to use Google as I don’t have any criticisms!

BloggerAt first I found blogger very difficult to use and thought it was over complicated. There are still things I find unclear on the sight. For example uploading a slideshare presentation to my blog. To my surprise ‘upload a video’ wasn’t the way you were meant to do it. I only found out how to do it about a week before I started my evaluation – as I knew I would need to be able to do this. However, after using blogger for my coursework I feel that I would use it with confidence again if I ever needed to. I learnt a lot about blogger and found that it was a good site to use for presenting my coursework.

Slide ShareI got a slideshare account as it had been recommended to me by many people. I have seen a few slideshare presentations and was impressed by there quality – as they presented information clearly and in an organised way. After learning how to do it, I embedded the HTML code into my blog, and this produced my slideshare presentation on my post. I would use slideshare again for presenting my ideas.

Kodak M550

I found that this camera battery runs out fairly quickly. I only found this out when I was taking my recce pictures when my camera died about ¾’s of the way through. I had to continue once my camera had charged again. However, I was pleased with the quality of the images produced. The camera was light, easily portable and very robust. Apart from a low battery life, I was very pleased with this piece of technology.

Sony Erisson Xperia PlayI was able to access blogger through my phone as they have a mobile friendly site. I was unaware of this until I went on holiday and needed to access my blog, but didn’t have my laptop. This was very useful as I didn’t want to fall behind on the deadlines I had set myself through out my coursework. I knew that my mobile phone had access to the internet but I didn’t realise that certain sites had a mobile friendly site. I learnt that my mobile has better internet connection than I thought. I didn’t use it often before my coursework as I thought it would be too slow. But, after using to access my blog, I intend to use it more.

Picnik

I had use picnik previously to edit pictures. Unfortunately the site is closing down, however this means that I had access to premium features for free. This was very useful as it allowed me to edit my pictures, for example airbrush and add makeup. This site was very good for editing my photos. I found this site very easy to use, even when I used it for the first time. I would of liked to of used it again but the site is closing on the 19th April.

Microsoft Publisher

I used Publisher to help my create my DPS. In fact, I used it for the majority of it. It allowed me to easily add text boxes and it is very easy to use. I liked the fact I could group things and save them as pictures – this meant I could easily upload them to my blog. I didn’t think I would use Publisher as much as I did but, combined with picnik, was very effective at creating my magazine.

Microsoft Word

I have been using Word of a number of years and find it very easy to use. I could use it to create slideshare presentations. I like Word because it produces professional looking documents which I needed, for example my questionnaire.

Microsoft Excel

I used Excel to present my questionnaire results. I wanted to do this to make my blog a bit more interesting instead of just writing long wordy posts. I was fairly familiar with Excel and it became easier to use as I was creating the pie charts. I would use Excel again for this purpose.