Instead of going to class the Friday before Spring Break, I spent part of my Thursday night before hand working on project three. The first thing I did was go to Heganoo to make an account, which took literally 30 seconds.

Once I made an account, I was kind of surprised that the site wasn’t more visually appealing. This was the first screen that came up:

Not really knowing what to do, I started clicking around and decided I would give the site a try! I clicked the ‘new project’ button on the top right hand corner and was given three options: map slide, image map slide, or event app. I clicked map slide and named it Myrtle Beach because that’s where I’m going for spring break starting Saturday.

Then, a Google Map looking like screen came up. It looked like this:

I searched for Myrtle Beach and then it gave me the option to add a tag and play with some different settings. I tried this:

But then it disappeared so I had to try again…..I’m feeling some frustration with this site because a lot of times, when I click to try to navigate the site, that annoying “are you sure you want to leave this page?” question box pops up and I’m just like, “I don’t know!!!” When I select to leave the page, then the site asks me if I’m sure I want to delete what I’ve done..again, “do I?!”

So I clicked yes and the site reset that original Google Map that popped up when I first decided to start the project. It always defaults to London so I’m wondering if that’s where the website was created.

I’m annoyed because when you try to add a moment onto the map, this box pops up for you to type a title, a message, but then there’s no done button so when I close out of it, it just disappears.

I kept doing this over and over again, and then I remembered Einstein’s definition so I decided to try a different facet of the site

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I decided to go to the website’s homepage and there was a gallery where you could see other people’s projects. “Great!” I though, “I probably should have started with this!” So I went through one about America’s Greatest Rodeos—who knew rodeos were so competitive! Surely a city girl like me.

In addition to learning about the rodeo scene in America and Miss Rodeo America (what a resume booster), I learned that this site allows you to employ pretty much every form of multimodal text from linguistic, visual, gestural and more.

I continued to navigate the menu options of the site and just generally found that the entire interface is visually unappealing. Just look at this terribly bland “search” screen:

I’m certainly not enticed. I then noticed that there are a series of plans users can purchase. I’m on the college student friendly plan of $0.00, but I was shocked to see that some people pay $499/month for the premium plan. $499. A. Month. What?!

This thought got me thinking that I really need to figure this bad boy out to see what all the big deal is because right now I’m just not getting it and can’t imagine what kind of person you are to spend that much cash on this website.

Next, I tried creating an image map slideshow and had a lot better luck with this, at least it seems so far! Somehow, I got a picture of Emma Watson on my map! Cool!

However, when I got to the part where I wanted to add information to this part of the map, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to save to the map! I made a cry for help but nothing happened.

Feeling completely defeated. I went to my favorite educational website for help.

I got a total of three results, which was educational in itself because I didn’t know it was possible to get so few results. Also, not a single one was of any help to me. Thanks for nothing, YouTube.

 

So after working for over 50 minutes with nothing to show for my troubles, I decided I will pick this up again sometime over break and hammer it out. Stay tuned for more updates!