Excuse me? Do you have Wi-Fi here?

  To think about the day when I could go somewhere and not need internet nor my cell phone. Does anyone still live like that? Well, my grandma doesn't have internet.  I never really realized the impact that this new generation of internet has had on school aged students until I started student teaching.
When the students can not get their printers to work they can email  my cooperating teacher their paper instead so she can print them. Well, one day she said she did not get several students papers, which then prompted the students to get out their smart phones and show her the sent file in their mailbox. I just started laughing, because this was just not possible to do, even 9 years ago when I graduated high school.
The other profound moment was the day they were developing characters, and my C.T had written many character traits on the board that they needed to use for a home work assignment. Before they left she told them to take a picture of it with their phones, so they could have it for homework. I once again, thought to myself how much times have changed, and how these students will never know an age without something there at the click of a button. (I am sounding like a grandma now huh?) Not only can arts students use a device like this to capture photos, but they can use it to record dance pieces, monologues, and scene work in class, and then use it when editing and tweaking outside of class. On top of this, arts educators can now pull up hundreds of clips and classroom video at a click by offering laptop hook ups , and wireless in classrooms. Remember when you had to drag the good old fashion VCR on the cart in, along with the overhead projector? Now we can just turn on a Smart Board and watch a dance class or watch someone show us how to do vocal warmups.
When I was studying in the U.K. I watched a Smart Board show a class of 6 year olds how to warm up their bodies.
I have even found myself feeling helpless if I cant get internet somewhere. When I started student teaching I asked if I could get access to the schools wifi, because I really needed it for lessons that I had planned. Honestly, I think the lessons would have been fine without access to the internet, but it enhanced it in so many ways. Plus, as much as we hate to admit it students are use to that glowing screen. If we spend 85 percent of the time doing lectures, test, scene work, monologue memorizing, reading from books, I think its only fair to give students a chance to learn by technology as well!

Group Final Project

        I am very excited to be working with musician and and dancers, as well as other theatre educators in this final project. The cooler thing is, is that the other theatre ed person is  more involved in tech design, so we will have a very well rounded project of music, dance, theatre performance, and theatre tech.
       The collaboration is going very nicely, and there has been really no conflicts or heated debates on what the project should entail. I think this is mostly due to the fact that we are using our own artistic differences, and putting them together as a unified page.

Black board and NYU

              Well, when I first discovered BB in my first semester at NYU I thought it was pretty cool, and wondered why my undergraduate college had never implemented this. Communicating with your professor and classmates  just by clicking a button seemed genius to me, because many times you can never get access to your classmates e-mail unless you go around asking them. I also loved how you could put the groups projects into one click of a button, and see everyone else's group as well. Of course, another great attribute is the discussion board that seems to basically function as a blog; which makes it so easy to reflect on class discussion, and finish up debates that began to put class way off topic.
                     So...all this makes Black Board sound wonderful right? Wrong!! Within the first month at NYU I was so annoyed by Black Board because almost every teacher made it a requirement. They wanted us to start topics for discussions, and then respond to someone else s topic,or  write our thoughts on the reading from the week prior, and before I knew it black board became more of an annoyance of busy work than a useful tool. Its very hard to read a class of 30's (more if you do it for more than one class) comments, and then post your own, and then be expected to come back and see what they said. If we were only taking one class it would be fine, but when you have a full course load these post become a burden. I soon found myself reading one persons comment, posting mine, and then never returning back to the post. Of course, this is sad because I am sure there were great things that people wrote back to me
         I also never saw a high use of the group discussion on the discussion page. I think this is mostly related to the fact that students didn't bother to put anything up because they knew only a few students would actually read it.
However, after the first semester my classes did not require BB as a homework assignment tool anymore, but it was still great to have around for emails, and sharing of lesson plans.
**My negative comments to BB have nothing to do with its efficiency or technical capbalities, but only about the way my professors used it in my first semester.