Monday, October 22, 2007

Alternate Formats Reflection

So I am done with the Alternate Formats Activity and definitely pretty excited about it as I found it definitely rather frustrating. There is definitely a lot of frustration that builds for me out of the uncertainty of working with a program I am not knowledgeable about. To start with I had a lot of difficulty finding the most recent version for the Mac and even after I found an update and downloaded it I couldn't find the features that I was supposed to have...leading me to believe that I had not actually downloaded the newest version. Regardless, thanks to some good friends who don't have Macs (PC users aren't all bad) I was able to add a bubble note anyway. I was actually pleasantly surprised on the other hand about uploading the PDF biology file into Kurzweil, as it was easier than I expected...that is if one is willing to accept the orange worm turning pink, which I was. I read the help section and apparently color not being displayed quite right is a fairly common issue with the Mac version when uploading other file formats. Overall the project wasn't as much work as I expected, just one of those rare days though that makes me think maybe life would be easier with a PC.

2 comments:

Marielle said...

Hi Kim!
I'm happy that I'm done with the project too, it wasn't as hard and time consuming as I thought it was going to be also. I thought at times this project was very frustrating, it must have been even more frustrating with the mac version because I read that there were some differences in the software. It is really hard to do a project when you are so uncertain about how to use the program, I kind of felt this way when doing the e-book also! Its kind of strange that there is a color difference when using the mac program, you'd think that would be an easy problem to fix. At least you know its not your computer and happens to a lot of people!


And PC users aren't all that bad...I guess I can say the same for Mac people now tooooo!

Kristen Smith said...

Kim
Although in my blog I noted how effective this program could be in an inclusion classroom, I agree that it was incredibly frustrating getting started. I felt as though if somebody had shown me once I probably would have picked it up and got the hang of it a hell of a lot faster than having to figure it out for myself. There is something to be said about the experience but I fully agree it was tough!