technology

Calm in the Digital Storm

Popular wisdom says this generation of students is digitally native, and that they have facility with digital technology that people even of my generation (I’m just on the upper edge of millenial) don’t have. Indeed, in my household we had a family computer all through my years in high school. Cell phones were still relatively novel, and the iPhone was not even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. This difference in perspective led to my over-enthusiasm for introducing digital technology in the classroom.

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Michelle Koza

Apping Math

"Photomath” is an app. It's free. Its name alone conveys its purpose: take a picture of a math problem and the app will instantly provide you a step-by-step solution to it.

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The Benefits of Analog

For Professor Carol E. Holstead, the “moment of truth” about note taking came when she found her students continually using social media during lectures.

“I could not compete with Facebook and YouTube, and I was tired of trying,” she writes in “The Benefit of No-Tech Note Taking,” which appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Further Thoughts on Sound Effects

Continuing on from my last blog about sound effects, I noticed that the use of them can make a boring creative endeavor more personal and fulfilling to the student. I teach an Audio Mixing class at Beekman. Most of the work involves working with loops of pre-existing audio to create an original mixed piece of music.

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technology

sound effects

audio mixing

The Sound Effects are Free

When I worked in the production/post-production business there was a running joke in our video and audio edit sessions: “The sound effects are free.” Originally, this was due to the fact that clients often didn’t understand why they had to pay for them. And so, we just gave them away for free as a perk. More importantly, the joke applied to the way a client described an action they wanted to see in an animation. Invariably the action was described with verbal sounds.

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technology

The Rule of Three

When you sit with a friend at lunch, do you keep your cell phone on the table? If you do, the mere presence of your phone can change the quality of the encounter.

“People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted,” writes Sherry Turkle, in her recent article “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.” “They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.”

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technology

cell phone

James Vescovi

In Search of the Digital Red Pen

Paper is great, and it gives a flexibility that typing doesn’t. I can leaf through a book faster than I can scan a PDF; word processing software isn’t as dynamic as the scrawls of a red pen. And I require students to mark their texts when they read to create “working texts.” Call me old-fashioned, but I have always been skeptical of jumping into the tech revolution with two feet. How was an app supposed to transform my teaching?

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Using Technology to Exercise the Mind - Part II

In a follow up to my last blog regarding how significant a role creative software can have in the development of a person’s mind, I’d like to share an illuminating example. Here at The Beekman School we offer various creative courses, and one of them is a course in the fundamentals of design using Adobe Illustrator as the software tool.

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technology