Monday, November 14, 2011

: * Reflections and thoughts from using NYU Blackboard in Teaching and Learnin

BLACKBOARD.
Well I for one think that blackboard is under used at NYU. I had a blackboard at my undergrad and it was also not being used. I think that it is hard for some teacher who are not "computer" people to use it to it's full potential.

PROS of BB - 1) It is a great place to have a reference of all of the information you have received over the course of the semester. It is nice to look back on your supplemental material and be able to refer back to your syllabus ( especially when you are teaching!)
2) when something is on BB it is there until you no longer have access to your nyu account, so even if you took a class your first semester - you can take a look back at it and use it as a reference point.
3) It is nice to have interactions with your professors on the web. It is easy to upload a paper to BB or answer a weekly reflection.
4) SAVE A TREE! BE GREEN!
5) It is just a great place to keep everything organized

CONS of BB
1) our system ( cough ALBERT cough) is usually slow. NYU's server is not the best. I find that on many occasions I can not get to BB and if there is something I need I get annoyed when I cant get through.
2) some professors don't like using BB because students can then use the excuse " but I posted it to BB?"

Reflections and Thoughts from The First Group Meeting.

Group projects are such a blast. Just kidding.
But for real! Group projects are good when you have time to really collaborate with the other group members. It is hard for our group because we all have such busy schedules.
I feel great about our first group meeting. It went really well! It is nice for Rachel and I because we are both musical theater people - therefore we appreciate theater, dance, and music. Andrew and Hui are very well versed in their performing arts as well! Our group decided to do a project incorporating La Bohem and RENT. We are going to use a power point, along with youtube videos and imovie, to show the history behind both and the adaptation that took place.
I am very excited about this topic and I cant wait to see how it turns out!

Investigating Browsers.

Growing up I used msn internet, and it took forever! I dont miss dial up and I also hated using the msn version of internet explorer!

When I had a dell laptop I used internet explorer. It was very slow and had trouble loading many of the pages. Now I steer clear of it because every time I use it, it is slow and has some sort of issue configuring with my computer.

When I got my mac it came with safari. I LOVED this browser because it worked in great conjunction with my mac computer. About a year after I had my mac , safari began running slow and took time to download web pages.

I took an HTML coding class and we needed to download many different browsers. This is when I began using fire fox and I am very loyal to it. Because they keep updating their browsers it seems to be the most efficient one I have used since my journey on the internet began.

I also like google chrome because I am a big google person. It is great for me that firefox holds a google option in the tool bar. I think that google chrome will begin to get used more widely because it hard for people to abandon their browsers for a new one!