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.

Frustrated with firefox!

OMG! I'm so frustrated! So I created the movie directory and uploaded the movie file to the movie directory and then set up my movie.html. Everything was correct but somehow, the movie player just won't show up using firefox browser. I looked at my html page and checked the commands over and over and all the names and extensions are exactly the way it should be. Just as I predicted, it was the firefox browser's problem again! I tried opening the page with Internet Explorer and the movie player worked perfectly. I even tried looking up wmv plug-ins for firefox browser and downloaded it, however the problem still persist. Maybe it's just my computer. I have no idea why this is happening! ARH!
Anyway, it's almost 2am in the morning, I will further investigate the firefox problem tomorrow.

We CANNOT live without technology

I just finish reading some classmate's blogs and it really got me thinking about the importance of technology. From the minute we wake up til when we go to bed. We are surrounded by technology. The 3 things I use most often throughout my day is, my iphone, my laptop, and we I get home I like to watch TV. I cannot imagine life without any of these. Well, actually if I had to give up one thing, I could go without the TV, since you can watch virtually anything online using a computer nowadays. I just like it more because I have a large screen TV. But the iphone is really an amazing tool. I couldn't believe what it can do when I first got it. Literally, it's like i'm carrying around a mini computer everywhere I go. I can check all of my email accts every minute if I wanted to. I added a facebook app onto my iphone and I can check the status of my friend's facebook anytime I want to. I can listen to mp3's on the ipod app on the iphone, I can check the weather, the stock market, .....play games, download games, and the list goes on. Actually I often say to my boyfriend, if someone has an iphone and you text them or email them, if they take DAYS to get back to you or not get back to you at all. They are intentionally doing it. I do not believe that they simply didn't get to it. hahaha I think the invention of iphone simply took technology to the next level. The level of access and the mobility of that access is just phenomenal. What will they think of next??!!

Animation Making

Thinking back, it has only been a week, but we have learned so much already. Last night, I successfully uploaded my animation gif image to my web page. Even though it was a lot of work from looking for the image to filtering over 15 images using photoshop, then converting them to gif files, when it was done, I felt a great sense of an accomplishment. It was a lot of fun. I'm so glad I'm taking this course over the summer and since we go to class everyday, I'm learning new things everyday. It feels great to learn at this speed and put what we have learned to practice right away, it helps me remember and master it faster.
After I finished making my animation, I went and googgled animation. I found a bunch of other animations online and realized that all of the animation address ends with GIF at the end. This may sound kind of silly, but it was only then that I realized that all the animation files are gif files.
In addition, I have also discovered something new last night as I finished posting my animation. I wrote in my animation webpage that the animation may not show up in the FIREFOX browser and if it doesn't, then try to view the page using other browsers. Well, what booggled my mind is that it actually worked the first time I posted online (my defult browser), then when I tried to refresh the page using the refresh button, only the music restarts, the animation doesn't. So then I went a little further to investigate the problem. I tried using Internet Explorer and each time I refresh the page it worked fine. The problem seems to be firefox, so I thought maybe I'm missing some kind of plug-in or my firefox is outdated. I updated my firefox browser, but the problem still persist. Finally, I closed everything and opened firefox again and opened my animation page and it worked! It was then I realized that with firefox, you have to closed the entire browser and open it again to view. Just hitting the refresh button will not restart the animation. AHA, I have discovered the problem. However, I still don't know why it does that!
A little note about progress, for the past 2 days, starting with the music files and then the image files and now the animation files set up, I feel that the speed of setting those html pages up and just the nagivation process around everything and uploading the images and audio files has tremendously increased as opposed to the first 2 days. Practice really makes it perfect.

First day of class

Today, I attended my first day of class for the summer. The course I'm taking is called tech resources for performing arts educators. I was actually 5 mins late to class because I got lost trying to find the location of the classroom. There were some major constructions going on outside and inside of the building and it was quit confusing for first timers. Luckily, I didn't miss too much. We went around the room and introduced ourselves one by one. I thought that was really nice. We all got to know a little bit about each other.
As the title of this course suggest, tech resources, it focuses on the use of tehnology in relationship to education. The most important tool and probably one we today cannot live without, the computer. Not only is it a great tool but a gateway to reach an unlimited amount of resources in a matter of a click. It is what we called the world wide web. As Dr. Gilbert mentioned how essential the WWW is today, not only for educational use but gave each individual it's own stage to shine on. Blogging is a great example of that. It's like a diary, only it's more public. It's a great communication tool as well. It lets your friends and family know the things that are going on in your life no matter how far they are.
One interesting story I would like to share is about a youtube audition. I entered the music education master's program in Spring semester so everything was kind of out of sequence. I was at the time in Pittsburgh and once I got my acceptance letter from NYU, I emailed my advisor on how to register for classes. We then pretty much did the whole advicement deal through email. It must've been 30 emails back and forth in total. I told her I wanted to take chamber music, so then she emailed the head of the strings department. Eventually, I got hold of the head of the strings through email and she asked me if I could go over to NYU on that day with my instrument and audition. Of course, she did not know that I didn't live in NY. So I told her that was not possible. She then asked if I could mail her a CD or DVD of me playing (preferably a past recital) So I did exactly what she told me to do. Mailed her a CD with 3 audio only files. She emailed me back and said that she couldn't play the files on her computer. At this point, it was only 2 days before she had to finalize the chamber groups for the coming spring semester. It was cutting really close. But suddenly it hit me. About a year ago, just for fun, I had uploaded all three pieces of my recital on youtube just to see if it would work. I went on youtube and checked if it was still there, sure enough, it was. So then I immediately emailed the links of all three videos to her and hoped that that would be okay with her. She wrote back right away and said that it was great. I ended up playing in a Bartok quartet.