Technological Resources

This week, we focused on familiarizing ourselves with various technological platforms which can enhance teaching an online course. I was particularly interested in Jing and Audacity. I was not acquianted with either of these applications prior to this week’s lab session. Consequently, I was delighted to learn that Jing serves as a free screencapture tool. I’d long been curious about the technique of recording one’s computer activities in realtime, but I wasn’t aware of any freeware that could perform such a task. Thankfully, Jing is transparently simple, and it was the easiest application of this week’s palette for me to handle.

I was even more interested in learning how to use Audacity. When I was in high school, I spent way too much time figuring out every nuance of the basic wave recorder included with Windows 98. I pressed that program to the limit to meet my musical recording needs. However, despite my fondness for such DIY audio engineering, I really appreciate Audacity for its multitracks, ease of editing, user-friendly interface, and cost (free). I am in the process of starting a podcast for my graduate school, and this technology will be extremely helpful in doing so.

Thanks to this week’s crash course in programs and applications, I feel a bit more confident in the online class environment’s  multimedia milieu - it’s become a lot easier over the course of the week to imagine availing myself of a panoply of online resources to play to different learning styles, as well as to offer variety for its own sake. Not only will this help me in my online teaching, but I hope to incorporate some of these tools into my F2F teaching.