Student Resources – Page 10

In the Spotlight: The Open Road, of course!

Welcome back faculty, staff, and students! We missed you this summer! Whether you’re returning to the OpenLab or signing up for the first time, remember to join the Open Road. The project is the one-stop-shop for the OpenLab’s Community Team. Here we keep you, our users, up to date on all the site’s goings-on, including news and updates. Check back here to find our office hours, workshops for students, or workshops faculty and staff. See our OpenLab calendar for all OpenLab events. And of course don’t forget about our Spotlight posts, where we highlight excellence and innovation on the OpenLab each week.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to join The Buzz, too, our student-run site!

As always, the OpenLab Community Team is here for you. Contact us online or at OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu.

In the Spotlight: Crear Futuros

The OpenLab is not for coursework alone! City Tech’s CREAR Futuros is a great example of a clean and straight-forward project on the site. CREAR Futuros, a joint project of the Hispanic Federation and the City University of New York, is dedicated to bringing increasing attention and resources to improve educational achievement and economic opportunity to Latinos. The OpenLab project site supports these goals by offering resources and information to City Tech’s Latino students. Students can come to the site to get oriented to opportunities offered by CREAR Futuros, to find contact information for key team members, and to learn about upcoming cultural events. Check out the site for an example of just one of many exciting projects that are using the OpenLab to build community within City Tech and beyond.

In the Spotlight: ENG2003 – Intro to Literature: Poetry

Prof. Cecily Iddings’ course ENG2003 – Intro to Literature: Poetry offers a great example of OpenLab use to encourage student writing and feedback. Students blog on assigned topics like close reading or language, sound, and form in poetry. They are also required to comment on each other’s posts, creating an ongoing discussion about course readings that extends from classroom to site. Especially exciting too is the course Glossary that students continually upgrade with definitions, examples of word use in poems, and their own analysis of the word in context. Be sure to check out the course site for new ideas to generate student engagement online!

In the Spotlight: COMD Internship Coordination Site

It’s that time of year when students are searching for internships. Luckily, Prof. Tanya Goetz’s Communication Design Internship Coordination Site is a one-stop shop designed to help students in the COMD Department find internships to meet fieldwork and study requirements. These internships can include placements at advertising agencies, graphic design firms, corporate design offices, and more. The site is self-explanatory, with pages for necessary internship documents, links to resources and databases for finding an internship such as the City Tech Professional Development Center, support for student networking, and resources for both academic and professional writing. Have no fear, students. The COMD Internship site is here.

In the Spotlight: PSY3405 – Health Psychology

The course site for Prof. Amanda Almond’s interdisciplinary PSY3405 – Health Psychology offers students both course documents and extensive multimedia resources to think about race and health. In addition to the course syllabus, requirements, and grading procedures, Prof. Almond provides her students with a course outline detailing weekly lectures, assignments, readings, film viewings, quizzes, and deadlines. On the home page, she rightly tells students that this course outline will be their best friend. Assignments for the course are also nicely organized under one easy-to-find drop-down menu. For added benefit, Prof. Almond has linked to further resources for the students’ reference. These include the New York Times’ Patient Voices feature and particularly important case studies of psychology experiments, which students can comment on for extra credit. If you’re wondering how to use an OpenLab site to equip students with tools for success in your course, Prof. Almond’s site offers a great example to guide you.

In the Spotlight: HMGT1102 – Intro to Hospitality Management

In Prof. Michael Krondl’s section of HMGT 1102 – Introduction to Hospitality Management, students can easily find the course syllabus, assignments, and readings. But most exciting about the site is the space it offers for students to blog about their visits to Smorgasburg and the Chelsea Market, complete with descriptions of the venues and mouth-watering photographs of the food. As a final project, teams of students will further use the OpenLab site to complete a concept of a New York City food truck, including a menu, standardized recipes, and spec sheets for the central ingredient of each menu item. Check out this site for a great example of student reflection, photography, and teamwork on the OpenLab — but not if you’re already hungry.

In the Spotlight: City Tech Printmaking Club

City Tech’s Printmaking Club is a one-stop shop for students learning to make prints. The club, advised by Profs. Libby Clarke and David Barthold and staffed by a top-notch team of student officers, is dedicated to “keeping traditional printmaking alive at City Tech.” On the club’s OpenLab site, students can find posts on the history of printmaking through the development of ink, on printmaking techniques like linocut, and on events like their recent Valentine’s Day Card sale. All around, this site is a great example for any club trying to boost their online presence.

P.S. Want to learn more about the Printmaking Club? Check out their current exhibition of prints in the City Tech library!

In the Spotlight: ARCH 1130 – Building Technology I

In ARCH 1130 – Building Technology I, Prof. Jason Montgomery teaches a wide breadth of design topics: from building assemblage to documentation. To do so, his students move from architectural theory to drawing practice to case studies, all in one semester. Prof. Montgomery manages to cover this much ground with the help of his OpenLab site. Students can find all the materials they need for each section of the course: from text books to drafting triangles, lecture notes to sketchbook images. Prof. Montgomery also uses his site to make sure that students have all the resources that they need for success in his course. He includes instructions for creating an ePortfolio, as well as reading strategies and learning rubrics. Check out the site to see all this, plus beautiful samples of his students’ work.

In the Spotlight: ENG1710 – Introduction to Language and Technology

In Prof. Lestón’s English class, Introduction to Language and Technology, students not only write responses to course reading, but also develop revision plans and second drafts of their writing on the course site. All this work — including Prof. Lestón’s feedback to each student — is available for the class to see, so that students benefit from observing their peers’ drafting process as well as their own. What’s more, Prof. Lestón has included the project that students in his Fall 2015 course undertook, thereby drawing a link from one semester to the next. And as an added perk, the “Culture Jams” section of the site keeps a “storehouse of viral images” related to the themes of the course, which both he and his students can populate as they come across them throughout the semester. Check out the site to see for yourself!

In the Spotlight: Literary Arts Festival

Planning for the 2016 City Tech Literary Arts Festival is underway, and the organizing committee is making full use of their site to get out the word. Check it out to see a great example of a Project on the OpenLab. You can find information about previous festivals, this year’s featured writer Mary Gaitskill, and the 2016 Writing Competition. And don’t forget to submit your writing to the competition; the deadline is February 25th! Have questions? Contact Festival Directors Professor Robert Ostrom and Professor Jennifer Sears.

Category: Student Resources