Week 13 Reflection

Reflecting On My CECS 5110 Journey

As my journey in the Multimedia in Technology Applications course comes to an end, I feel grateful for all that I’ve learned. I’ve gained so many useful skills, many of which I’ve been able to directly apply to my work.  Gaining skill using the Adobe Creative Suite, in particular, has been an excellent addition to my skillset.  I’m already using Photoshop and Premiere Pro to create new projects in my office, and my boss and coworkers have been impressed with the new contributions I bring to the table.  We’re starting a new podcast project next year that I never would have attempted had I not taken this class and learned about some of the audio editing software available.  Creating the video, while extremely stressful due to my slow computer, was probably the most fun activity I did.  I was able to throw together everything I’ve done over the semester and see a final product that I could be proud of.  I fully intend to work with our multimedia specialist to see if I can recreate something like that in the future!

If there was something I still would like to learn, it would be Adobe Illustrator.  I know that it isn’t essential for developing instructional material, but I’d enjoy tooling around with the program anyway.  Perhaps I’ll watch some videos on my own later.

There are a few things that I still feel hazy on.  For one, I’m not as comfortable with building a website as I’d like to be.  I’ll begin playing with Dreamweaver this week, so that may change, but I get the feeling that this might be a struggle for me.  The technology aspect of this profession is one of the things I find the most exciting, so I hope that I can get a better handle on this technology in time for my advanced web design class next semester!  Moving forward, I’d also like to get better at InDesign.  I definitely see the advantages of using this program, and I’d love to begin creating our instructional guides using this software at work.  That being said, my experience with the program has been frustrating at times.  I feel as though the problem can be overcome with practice and training, so I fully intend to watch more videos to become even more comfortable on this program.  It looks like I’ll be doing a lot of additional exploration this Christmas holiday!