Baxter HW #1: Introduction

Hello, my name is Marco Attenello and this is my blog. I’m 23 years old and I’m a senior here at CSUN. I come from a family of 5 and was born and raised in Southern California. I have two brothers: Frank, 27 and John, 21. My entire family is in the healthcare field to some capacity so as you can see, my intention to pursue a career in teaching makes me sort of feel like the odd man out. Although, if teaching doesn’t work out for me in the long run, I’ll probably jump on the bandwagon and go into healthcare as well since the economy only seems to be friendly towards healthcare professionals at the moment.

I’m currently residing in San Pedro and commuting the 50 miles up to Northridge twice a week for my classes. I’ve been working for IPC International Corporation as a private security guard for the last 3 months. Lately, I’ve been sketching a lot of anime artwork and generally take every chance I get to draw, so I guess you could say that drawing is one of my main hobbies. I also take every opportunity I get to go up to the mountains to go snowboarding. My other hobbies include gaming on my PS3 and social networking through Facebook and Myspace.

As for media technology, I believe that since personal computers have been around for well over a decade now as well as the internet, it’s absolutely essential for technology to play a major role in teaching. Since I’ve been a student here at CSUN, I’ve had many opportunities to utilize the perks of technology and internet as a student. I find it to be so much more convenient to be able to bring my laptop to my classes instead of carrying around a bunch of notebooks or loose paper. Also, WebCT seems like a pretty useful tool to administer and collect classwork, which saves a lot of paper and keeps things much more orderly and organized. Lastly, I’ve noticed that professors who use Powerpoint or media projectors hooked up to their laptops generally have more time to explain the notes in their lectures rather than wasting a lot of time writing on chalkboards or whiteboards.

The only ineffective use of media technology that I’ve noticed was a program used in a political science class I took here that came with a personal remote for each student in the class that was designed to keep track of attendance. This program seemed like a good idea, but it ended up wasting more time than regular roll taking because people constantly forgot their remotes and had to personally go up to the professors to be checked in for class.