in Close

To close my blog at the end of this semester – my first semester at NYU as a graduate student, I have to say - thanks for being patient with me as I adapted to commuting, dealing with horrible train schedules, and especially coping with the unfamiliar territory of electronic devices, computers, and software. I have learned so much this semester through this class. Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Actionscript, Fetch…etc. All of which I had never used before. I guess it was probably frustrating for most of you also dealing with my strange questions – did she REALLY just ask that?! Doesn’t she know that by now?! Omgoodness…. – but seriously, this was all entirely new. In observing other final projects, viewing blogs, and reading websites I enjoyed how Danby “sweetrain” added lots of photographs and other things to her website which made it more accessible for friends and family rather then just being in a performance format for clarinet, although she did include a button for that also. Youngju definitely had the most professional looking “profile” or portfolio looking – page, until the clip from youtube loaded, then I just laughed, very educational and informative with links to important websites. I had trouble getting some of the web pages to load – perhaps just my computer? I read through some blogs and found that most people had used a mix of personal stories and interesting materials with educational posts from news or research that they had discovered and found interesting. Jessica’s blog was the one which used a little different color scheme then the rest of us – why does everyone else seem to be stuck on blue and green? Myself included…anyway. And she discussed rice milk in one of her posts, which was random and something I haven’t tried in a while. Perhaps I’m just hungry. To close, thank you all very much for a wonderful class in which I learned so very much. I will not abandon this skills but continue using dreamweaver (especially) and flash to create a website for my private violin students in hopes that they will become more organized and prompt at practicing and attending lessons – yeah right. Cheers!

Accomplishments

Evaluate this course in the context of your own progress and development and speculate on what you might do to further your learning and understanding of technology in performing arts or music education, and how it might apply to your future teaching or art/music making: The strongest feature of this class was the flexibility and student centered learning experience that allowed for a wide range of students with varying abilities and backgrounds in web design to be combined into one class and still learn and a relatively consistent pace. For example, I had never used photoshop – the simple photo editing program – because I was not priviledged enough as a child to have computer or internet available to me at home or at school. I learned computer skills and typing later and don’t have as much experience with any of that. Through this class I was able to learn all of those programs at a basic, yet complex level rather quickly with the patient and careful instruction of the professors. Really – somehow I learned basic skills in photoshop, flash, dreamweaver, fetch, etc in one semester!!!