Tools for Teaching & Learning

BRIGHTSPACE

Brightspace is the University's Learning Management System (LMS), where instructors can set up course sites. See the Brightspace Setup section of Planning Your Course.

ZOOM

Zoom is NYU’s audio/video/web conferencing platform. Use Zoom for online synchronous discussions, recording, virtual office hours, advising, and webinars.

• Gallatin’s Essential Guide to Zoom 

• Gallatin’s Guide to Zoom in the Classroom

• Gallatin’s Zoom How-To Playlist (video playlist)

• NYU Zoom

• NYU Zoom how-to articles

• NYU Zoom backgrounds and hold screens

GOOGLE WORKSPACE

NYU-licensed Google Workspace apps include email, drive, docs, sheets, slides, calendar, sites, and forms.

• NYU Google Services

• NYU Google Apps how-to articles

• NYU-Branded Templates (for Google Docs and Google Slides)

• Google Workspace Learning Center

• LinkedIn Learning Video Tutorials (sign in with your NYU credentials first)

NYU STREAM

NYU Stream is the university’s streaming service, accessible only to the NYU community. In addition to storing, watching, and sharing audio and video, NYU Stream offers a suite of tools, many of which can be used for instruction: 

Main Uses

• Brightspace Integration for creating & sharing instructional Stream content directly from within Brightspace. This integration includes the ability to Access Media Gallery Analytics to view and analyze student engagement.

• Captioning and Transcription Services for making your media accessible. 

Creating & Editing

• PowToon for creating animated presentations and videos, such as this Plug-and-Play: Project Management for Students video.

• Stitching Media Together: combine multiple pieces of media together to create a single video

• Video Editor for basic editing, such as creating clips.

Interactive Engagement

• Annoto for collaborative video annotations.

• In-Video Quizzing for embedding questions into your video. Try it for yourself with this In-Video Quiz Example.

• Interactive Video for adding interactive elements to any video, allowing users to create branching narratives or to include links to external resources. Watch this NYU Interactive Video Sample.

Screen Capture

• Express Capture for quickly and easily recording yourself.

• Kaltura Capture for screen recording a lecture or presentation, with the options of presenting a slideshow, recording narration, and including a recording of yourself with a picture-in-picture effect.

Sharing

• Channels for creating a collection of videos from multiple contributors.

• Playlists for creating an ordered group of videos from those that you own.

To learn more, see the NYU Stream Support Videos and the NYU Stream how-to articles.

EDITING SOFTWARE

Post-production hardware and software is available at the Digital Studio and Gallatin's Digital Creative Lab. See the latest list of available editing software on NYU's Software List, which currently includes some of these popular products:

• Adobe Creative Cloud (available for free via NYU’s VCL)

• FinalCut Pro (available for purchase with NYU discount)

• iMovie (may be available on Apple devices)

• NYU Stream (free for NYU)

• QuickTime (available on Macs)

• Find more video tools on Digital Gallatin.

ZOOM RECORDING FOR STUDENTS

The ability to record with NYU Stream is not available to students. However, instructors can request that their students gain access to recording in Zoom if there is a teaching-and-learning need. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Instructors: Email your request to zoom-service-team@nyu.edu and include the name of your course, the course number, and a list of your students’ netIDs. 

2. Students: Fill out the Zoom Request Form. Students will be approved for recording only if their project specifically requires a web-conference type of format (e.g. group presentations, interviews, etc.). Students can then upload their video projects to NYU Stream, where they can add captions, share them with instructors and classmates, and add interactive elements, if desired (see above).

Annotation tools allow you and your students to collaboratively comment on and/or mark up a document, whiteboard, slide, image, video, or website, thereby promoting direct interactive discussion with the material and providing a means to perform a close reading.

• Annoto: add time-based comments to a video (NYU-licensed)

• Google Workspace: most Google products have collaboration capabilities (NYU-licensed).

• Hypothesis: highlight and annotate websites

• Perusall: annotation tool integrated with Brightspace (NYU-licensed)

• SoundCloud: add time-based comments to an audio file

• Voicethread: annotate a piece of content (image, presentations, video, whiteboard) with a voice recording, webcam recording, text, and more. (NYU-licensed)

• Zoom Annotation: enable annotation for shared screens and whiteboards. (NYU-licensed)

• More annotation tools are listed on Digital Gallatin.

For the latest guidance for instructors and students, see Teaching with Generative AI. Instructors and administrators may also be interested in NYU’s Private Generative AI Service Pilot, which offers access to an internal, secure, managed service.

Many Gallatin faculty have included mapping projects into their courses. Doing so gives students the opportunity to work with data, visualization and issues of representation, and digital storytelling methods.

• ArcGIS and Esri Storymap: Create a multimedia, interactive narrative around collected data. Request a consultation with NYU’s Data Services.

• Google My Maps: Easily create a collaborative map with layers, images, and links.

• StoryMapJS: Easily create stunning, embeddable, multimedia story maps with this free tool.

• More mapping tools are listed on Digital Gallatin.

Combine several media items (text, image, video,  audio, etc.) into a cohesive multimedia project by arranging them into a website or other digital storytelling platform. All of the platforms below are available through NYU:

• Google Sites: easy-to-use, no-code website builder, integrated with other Google products, such as Google Drive and YouTube .

• NYU Web Publishing: flexible, highly customizable website builder powered by WordPress.

• ArcGIS StoryMap: cascade-style digital storytelling platform for geodata-driven narratives.

Polls and surveys can be used in a variety of instructional contexts, from mid-semester feedback to in-class discussion starters. Options at Gallatin include:

• Brightspace Survey: Solicit feedback from your students from within your course site. 

• Google Forms: Create simple quizzes and surveys.

• Poll Everywhere: Create live, in-class polls for a dynamic way to encourage student engagement. Poll Everywhere is also offered as an integration with Brightspace.

• Qualtrics: Create simple or advanced web surveys.