Portfolio Showcase

I attended the porfolio showcase last Thursday to get some ideas for my portfolio. I got some great artistic ideas to add a special touch. One of the ideas I really liked dealt with layering pieces of construction paper to add color to the portfolio. I talked with a girl named Brittany that had a very nice portfolio that I admired. She had layers of paper behind her resume that added a little something extra. She also made very nice cover pages for each of her sections. The page had the Cortland seal, the Cortland logo, the section name, her name and a picture of her. All of the elements that I saw at the showcase will help enhance my portfolio and make me even more marketable.

iDance Dances It's Way Into Cortland

I attended the iDance workshop last week in Park Center. The workshop consisted of a 3-5 instructional session and two 8-10 testing sessions. The 3-5 session taught us how to use the equipment of iDance and what we would need to set it up in a school setting. iDance is very cool and fun to play because it allows a large amount of people to play on one screen. It is played on a game pad that is similar to the one of Dance Dance Revolution. The pad is hard, and apparently indestructible) and has four arrows for each direction. The screen can show the statistics of 32 people at one time. The statistics show the percentage of correct steps hit, how many steps were late and how many steps were early. It also shows you the amount of steps that you have taken all together in that session. All of this information can be recorded and saved to see progression. During the 8-10 session, 18 people were hooked up to heart rate monitors and put through different levels of iDance. There was a monitor that went in between the rib cages and also a watch on our wrist that showed our heart rate at all times. In between some of the levels, surveys were given that recorded how we felt about the activity as well as our fatigue level. Hopefully this information and statistics will be available to see because I'm very interested in seeing mine!

"Successful games are ones that are fun and promote one's competence, autonomy, and relatedness. iDance is unique in that it does support all four of these elements all within a physically challenging dance game."

Dr. Stephen Yang, M.S., PhD-ABD
Assistant professor at SUNY Cortland

Turkeys Trot into St. Mary's for Thanksgiving

Our fifth lab at St. Mary's was a fun Thanksgiving theme! It was a good day for me because I got to interact with students that I never had before. I got to shoot a ball with a boy in third grade and teach him how to shoot a one-handed shot. He didn't know that he was able to complete the task, but with a little guidance he was making all of his shots in! Along with basketball, I played jump rope for a long time. The girls taught me a lot of the jump roping songs that I had never heard before. They also knew how to do things such as double dutch and move different ways between the rope, I was impressed! At the end of the lab, my group did the song "The Turkey Dance", which was a spoof off of the chicken dance. The kids loved doing this song because they knew the actions and it was familiar to them. The hardest part of this lab for me was trying to find out how to incorporate a Thanksgiving theme into my attire. I took a head band and stapled some feathers to the top and wrapped a scarf around my hips. The kids are so entertained no matter what you do as long as you show that you put forth some effort! Some of the girls took my head band and wanted to wear it themselves!