Review as Re -- Viewing

For this assignment I decided to review Google Documents, which seems part and parcel of Google Drive, and FotoFlexer. While this was not my first time using Google Docs, it was the first time I really took a critical look of its abilities and was happy to find new uses and a broader understanding of it as a tool. I was also happy to find a free web-based photo editor that was easy to use without losing too much efficacy, in FotoFlexer.

Google Documents (and Google Drive): I'm happy to have the opportunity to write a review for Google's collaborative word processor and the file sharing space associated with it. Like many web-based document editing tools, it's easy to use and mirrors the Microsoft Office suite enough that your pre-existing skills are easily transferable. In other words, there's not too much new to learn. However, it has the added perk of having features that more recent versions of Office have, that my version doesn't. My favorite is the "Research" tool that allows you to look up articles and insert their citations in the margin of your page. Despite this, I think it would be hard for me to begin a document in this space because it places my prime distraction (the internet) directly in sight while I write. As a revision tool, and a tool for sharing work for either peer-review or collaborative creation, I really do see a way I could make meaningful use of this in the future: both in and outside of the classroom.

FotoFlexer: At first click, I was greeted by a pop-up advertisement and I was immediately reminded of how certain products remain free. However, after the first pop-up, I found a lot of reason to like this site. It allows a wide range of easy to use photo-editing ability for the kind of person (like me) who is looking for simple and quick editing ability. Under it's "Geek" tab, it also allows for some more complicated photo-editing that I didn't expect to see. It took a little bit of searching but I was also able to find not only their own posted demos of the photo-editing tools but also quite a few sites that had more help for this site. While it might not be able to do complicated photo-editing, it does seem like it could do just about anything the average person would want to do with their photos.