Blog Post #5 Assignment

 Write a regular blog post about technology that you learned about from someone else.

    I would say that this is a bit of a difficult question for me, due to many aspects of what I know about computers, which is what first came to mind when I thought of "technology," coming from me experimenting, messing around, just doing things on my own. There wasn't really anyone who I really asked for information or advice when it came down to how to use a computer, or how they worked. For example, no one really taught me how to use a search engine, or how to see something I downloaded. I was able to figure those out on my own, as well as many of the various sites that I know about. Curiosity (combined with caution, of course) and introvertedness led me to being able to look up or check out different things without talking to others about it beforehand. However, there were some aspects that I did get from others, that being from family or from people online.

    One of the first ever softwares I remember using was Type to Learn 4, or as we called it, TTL4. I believe my elementary school required us to use this software to learn how to type efficiently. It taught us how to position our hands when typing (though I'll admit I never used that advice, especially once I started gaming on PC- WASD, shift, and space keys all the way). It also, through different typing games and various sentences, gave us the knowledge and skill of how to type faster and with less errors. This was one of the few educational sites I actually found fun, so I often tried beating my previous records. I can't exactly say if it benefited me, but I don't regret using this software.

    Something else I learned about from others was coding. While I started learning my first programing language, java, in 9th grade, I've been using the program Scratch since 6th or 7th grade. Through that I made a few games of various genres, and decided to return to it for a school project (I would've used Unreal Engine 5 but my laptop keeps quickly crashing when trying to pull it up, and I haven't exactly learned C++ yet- only java and python). I'd say that those were among my favorite assignments in middle school. And now that I think about it, all of my favorite assignments for each school I went to had to deal a lot with computers. For high school, us using Code.org was a close second for my favorite, losing to us making music on Soundtrap (reminding of me of when we made music in Garageband. Wow, the memories...

    It goes without saying that we, intentional or not, or even willing or not, learn a lot about technology from others. This can surely also be applied to everything- since we do not start off knowing everything, and testing everything on our own would not only be very time consuming, but would be incredibly risky. It is best for everyone to learn from others, and have them help further the spread of that information. Through working together, we can become incredibly efficient vessels of knowledge, and increase what we know exponentially than if we researched on our own.