3.Technology and Teaching

In today's information age, technology has become more and more important as a tool for teaching. Even going back 7 years, when I was still in high school. Some of my teachers were already utilizing technology in their teaching. I still remember our english literature teacher taking us to the library one class to the computer lab just to research on materials for our research paper. At the time, google just came out and becoming more and more popular. She specifically asked everyone to go to google.com and search for materials. It was from that class that I learned what google was and how much information there was out there. It seemed endless and fascinating. If you go back even further, overhead projectors were one of most commonly used teaching tools since the 1980's. Before they were invented, teachers had to hand write everything on the board which is highly inefficient. With the overhead projector, the transparency sheet is pre- written with materials. After each use,it can simply be replaced with a new, fresh sheet with more pre-printed material, saving class time vs a blackboard that would need to be erased and teaching materials rewritten by the educator. Following the class period, the transparencies are easily restored to their original unused state by washing off with soap and water. Hence, saving time for teachers as well as the students. In recent years, however, new technology, especially computer technology have grown tremendously and new computer softwares have been invented to replaced old used of projectors. Now microsoft powerpoint have replaced the use of overhead projectors in that it not only allow educators to put text, but to allow images, videos, as well as audio, thus, creating a highly animated and interactive presentation. The use of internet is another huge movement of technology today. As I researched for the topic of our group presentation on social network sites and it's relation to education, I noticed it's potential in helping educators better communicate with their students and in turn helping the students learn in a more interactive way. John Dewey strongly believed in a democractice form of life, in self-directed learning. It is through that mindset along with cultural resources provided by the educators can one be successful in acquiring knowledge. With the vast amount of resources on the internet, it is now possible for educators as well as students to self-direct ourselves to learn. Similarly, Jerome Bruner believed learning only takes place when one creates it's own work. It is through creating does learning takes place. That idea is somewhat similar to Dewey's belief that art is a lived experience. With art, we do not sit there and master the facts and techniques. One has to go through the process of creating to really learn and not just knowing the process and seeing the end product. It seems to me that the view points of Dewey, Bruner, Elliott, Mcluhan, and Eisener, all have one thing in common, and that is that the most important part of learning is the process, and as human being, we learn from what we have previously acquired and build up from there.

2. How learning music can enhance literacy skills

My area of art is music. I first encountered music at the age of 3 when I picked up a 1/16 size violin. I definitely feel that having musical skills helped me through the process of learning languages I know today. My first language was manderin Chinese, the official dialect spoken in China. I also can speak fluently in another dialect( in my native city in China.) Even though it is also Chinese, it sounds completely different than manderin. In fact, if you are not from the city, you probably can not understand a word. I did not learn any English until I came to the U.S at age 9. When I first came to the States, I did not even know the english alphebet, but it only took me a little less than a year to learned to speak fluently in English. Of course, there are still endless vocab to learn even till this day. But with everyday conversation, I was pretty fluent in a year. I have also been told that I have very little to no accent when I speak. Although, the age was probably a major factor. They say that the younger you are, the easier it is to learn a language. However, I still believe that the musical skills I acquired early on definitely played a part in it. Learning an instrument is a lot like learning a language. It requries one to learn how to read symbols. Notes are expressed in symbols as letters are the symbols that form words. When you learn music, you are practicing your listening skills, memory skills, as well as self-discipline. All these skills are also essential for learning a language. When you are learning to speak, you need to first listen to others speak. Then, by forms of imitation, you learn how to speak. You need your memory skills when learning new vocabularies. We build our vocabularies by remembering the ones we have learned in order to increase in volume. Last but not least, is self-discipline. It takes not only passion but self discipline to learn anything. Self discipline is what puts dreams and passion to work. It is the "do" or "action" part. When you have that, you can learn anything you want. These are some of the main reasons why music education is so important. It is why educators and artists are advocating to have music education alive in our public schools.

1. Colleague Websites

This is Gregary's Homepage, I especially like the neon Cotton Club sign on the top. It is very eye catching to readers. The look and the content really caught my attention and made me want to read what this "cotton club" is about. I also like the image next to the description, the whole vintage look of it really fits well with the content. The music playing in the background is also very appropriate. I can tell that Greg has put a lot of thought into creating the homepage. Furthermore, the tech assignment page is very well organized and easy to navigate. It is created by using tables with very thick borders. Overall, I like all the choice of images and videos in your tech assigment page. My favorite link is your Project page. Very interesting and informative video in the project page. The korea map image link is also a great idea. Lastly, great group work on the Korea project webpage. Very nice table layout. Good Job!


This is Seung Eun's homepage. I really like the color, it's simple yet very pretty and pleasing to look at. In your introduction on the front page, you said you have two dogs named "Thank You" & "Very Much", is that for real?? I have a dog too, that's why i'm especially intrigued. haha I love the music background in your tech assignment page. It is the same music as the youtube video you showed us on Thursday during your group presentation with the hip pop dance and korean traditional instrument playing in the background. Seemingly two very incoherent things, but yet fits well and gives the listener a breath of fresh air. I also like your table demo page. The pictures are very cute. It seems like you have a pretty good grasp of how to use tables already. I still find it pretty difficult to use especially if I want to create more sophisticated looking ones. Good Job!

This is Alejandro Baez's Homepage. I really enjoy looking at your webpage. I love the moving fonts next to Welcome. How did you do that? I have been periodically checking out your website and have notice that you quite often make changes to the layouts of your pages. I just noticed today that you made many change to your tech assignment page. I love the variation of colors of each table box. The animation moving staff is so creative. The laughing baby is hilarious. I remember you playing it in class, that was really funny. I totally agree with what you said in your music concrete page about terrible singers can sound great after polishing and modification with a great music recording software. I have had first hand experience with that. I interned at a record label in China last year and have sat in professional recording studios and recorded some tracks myself in there. It was such an amazing experience. I sang and played my instrument in some of their tracks. I have to admit, even though I do have perfect pitch, while you are singing with the headphone, sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not you are singing in tune while singing. But afterwards when you listen to the playback, then you hear all the slightly out of tune notes. And sometimes it is just too much trouble going back and record it again, you can digitally tune the notes into the right pitch with some click of buttons. While it is a great tool, I do agree that some people do abuse it. I have heard some very terrible singers record in the studio, I mean completely out of tune! But if you listen to the end results, it sounds nothing like the rough track. A huge problem that exist right now in the music industry in China is lip-synching. I guess that's the big controversy with technology.

I hate car alarms!

Monday night at around midnight, right below where I live on the other side of the street, there was a car parked and the alarm went off. At first I thought maybe after a while the owner would have noticed and turn it off but the stubborn alarm just kept going off every couple of minutes for the next 2 hours. It was literally driving me nuts! Since it was past midnight, it was especially loud and annoying. The owner of the car must have parked here and went somewhere else far enough that he/she couldn't hear the alarm. It got to a point where I just couldn't take it anymore and thought I have to do something because I thought it was illegal to have alarms in a residential neighborhood. (I live in Queens) I mean I have seen "Don't Honk Penalty $350" signs in manhattan, and this alarm is a honking noise. So I went to look up online for this kind of issue, I couldn't find if car alarms were illegal, but I did find this pdf file that addresses that car alarms is not effective in preventing auto theft and they are working on making them illegal. And in NYC, there's a limit of 3 mins for car alarms. Well! This is way more than 3 mins. So in the end, I called the police. After about another 20 mins, the car alarm stopped. I still didn't know if it was the police that did something or the car owner turned it off, or if the car just ran out of battery. Afterwards, I was so wired that I couldn't even sleep until the sun came out.

Multi-track adventure

WOW, I just finished creating a multitrack using Audacity. I'm so happy it worked! I have to admit that that took a long time, not the multitracking part where I split the source files into fragments and placing them in new tracks(6 of them), but what took up a whole chunk of time was print screen the steps and then modifying the sizes in photoshop. Actually, it was probably extra tedious for vista users. Originally I thought to print screen, all I had to do was just hit function and prt src and paste it to photoshop, but nope! It wouldn't paste! I tried to paste it to desktop, but that didn't work either. I was getting so frustrated, then I called a friend whos really good with computers and told him I couldn't paste it onto my desktop. He paused a little and said, "Oh, try right clicking on the desktop and then go to new, then bitmap image, and then edit the image in paint and hit control V(paste)." I was like....."ok....u sure?" But to my surprise, it worked! I don't know if that's the only way to do it, but it worked and that's good enough for me! HAHA
So if any of you guys (vista users) have the same problem, try it this way. If there's an easier way, let me know!

Group Project Green Team

Earlier this week, everyone got their group project team assignment. I love the idea of using RGB as team categories. It's very creative and certainly appropriate for our class. Sarah, Nicole, Julie and I are on the "Green" team, the topic of our presentation will focus on social network through the web and how educators can utilize those tools in their teaching whether inside or outside the classroom. We will discuss social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, My Space and how we can use them as tools for teaching as well as a way of communication among teachers and students. We will also discuss the positive as well as the negative sides of these websites. I'm sure that everyone will find this topic very relatable as we probably all use many of those websites in our lives daily. Hope we will all have a great discussion about this topic!

Squared 5 is amazing!

Yesterday in class, Dr. Gilbert introduced the squared 5 streamclip software. I downloaded the software after I got home and started working on my literacy powerpoint presentation. I knew ahead of time that I wanted to put some videos on, and I kind of had an idea of which video I want to use, and that particular video is on youtube. I remember hearing Dr. Gilbert say that you can even download youtube videos onto your computer using the URL address on youtube. So I decided to give it a try. It was just as easy as it sounds! All you have to do is go to file in the squared 5 software and open URL and that's it! The video is saved to your computer. So the video I downloaded from youtube is a mp4 video. But I wanted to use a more commonly used file, maybe AVI or quicktime(common for apple users). So all I have to do is again find the mp4 file I just downloaded on youtube and convert it using squared 5 software into the more commonly used format. It was so simple to use.