We have reached the finish line :)

Wow I have to say this has been a really interesting semester especially in my ALES 204 class. I can not believe its all over and all that is left are finals! Right now all thats on my mind though is Christmas which is definitely one of my favorite holidays of the year and just thinking about all that food makes me drool. Until then its study study study.

http://www.4socialmediaconsulting.com/

When I first walked into ALES 204 I can honestly say I was not very excited about being in this class and thought it would be such a waste of time. I didn't really think social media could be used for anything except for your own personal entertainment but now that i've gone through an entire semester in this course I have completely changed my mind and can see the great uses of social media. I only knew of facebook and twitter as a social media tool but I never really realized how many more tools existed out there to help with communication like blogging or flickr if you want to share photos. Social media tools like these help connect everyone's ideas together. I learned these tools can also be used for research and helping me obtain a career in the future. Sites like linkedin help future employers obtain information about the person they want to hire or even just obtain information on research topics. Also a business facebook page, which I had no idea even existed can act like your online resume because it leaves out your personal facebook page and keeps your business one looking professional. If your not much of a reader other social media tools are available like youtube and audio boo. These websites allow you to put up your own videos or voice recordings on the internet to share with everyone. Not only were the classes very helpful but so were the labs. We learned how to create a Pecha Kucha presentation, poster presentations, practised public speaking, learned proper writing citations, interview practise and how to send emails for certain situations.

These classes and labs let us experience all these social media tools first hand and so did creating this blog. For instance our first blog post was to introduce ourselves which I feel like I could have done a better job now and same with our second post where we had to create a business facebook page and blog about it after. I feel like after writing those two blogs I began to feel more comfortable sharing my ideas. For our third blog we got to edit a wikipedia topic of our choice, which I thought was really cool because I got to do one that I have a real passion about. It was pretty tricky to learn all the wiki codes and stuff at first but towards the end it got easier and gave me more to blog about. Our fourth blog was a topic of choice so I decided to choose to blog about audioboo. I really enjoyed listening to podcasts for music purposes only but after class I found out it could be used for so much more like interviews which we got to practise using audioboo in our labs. It was actually pretty fun. A fellow classmate of mine Rachael felt the same way and was also very excited to have discovered audioboo.

As an aspiring nutritionist/dietitian I feel all these tools that I have learned how to use will benefit me in the future and I recommend that everyone out there try and experiment around with some of these tools as well cause no matter what you are doing whether it be studying or just for fun social media is a very important thing these days and will be in the future.

Here are some comments that I posted on some of my other classmates blogs:
1. I posted on Sydney's blog about her wikipedia article. I found it interesting since she wrote about allergic reactions and I have terrible allergic reactions.
2. I posted on Brian's blog because he is also a fellow nutrition and foods student that is also a male like me. There are not many males in this field of study so it was nice to see what another male blogged about.
3. Toni's blog about facebook shared the same ideas as what I thought about the professional facebook assignment so i had to comment on it and share my same experience.
4. Rebecca's blog was probably one of the best blogs that I have seen so far. Her story about her twin brother and why she chose nutrition was just so passionate that I could not not comment on it!
5. Kelsey also had one of the most professional and interesting blogs i've seen. This course seemed to be perfect for what she was interested in, which was public relationships. After reading her blog i just wanted to comment on it.

Thank you everyone for reading my blog so far and happy holidays :) . Also here is a sweet video about what Microsoft thinks the future of social media will be like.