cold calls

4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Panopto Recordings

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

When classes went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic, Boston College installed cameras in every classroom to record lectures. These videos are designed to encourage sick students to stay home, as they can now do so without falling behind on classes. However, there are many other ways to use these recordings to your advantage! Here are some tips for using “Panopto” this semester.

Review Material While Outlining

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s probably the best use of Panopto recordings out there, so it’s worth mentioning. You won’t be able to watch every class lecture during finals week, so you shouldn’t rely on these recordings too much as the semester begins winding down. However, watching a class or two to refresh your memory on particularly challenging or confusing topics could be really useful.

I tend to only use these recordings during finals prep when I’m reviewing notes that no longer make sense to me. Going back to the Panopto from that class and watching the short clip where I took those notes can clear up a lot of confusion. This is a great way to quickly resolve an issue without halting your study progress to meet with a professor. Getting to the bottom of the confusion on your own will also help you remember the material better than you’d be able to if a peer simply told you the answer.

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365 of 1L: Internal Monologue of My First Cold Call

/ Dan Riley / Leave a comment

I was never really worried about getting cold called.

For one thing, my name, appearance, and general vibe are so monumentally uninteresting that I knew I’d be functionally anonymous to my professors. For another, I came to law school straight through from undergrad. My academic career has been uninterrupted since kindergarten. So when people started to hype up the pressure of cold calling, this long-standing historic educational tradition built on the learning philosophy of Socrates, a daunting gauntlet every 1L has to traverse, I may have been a little nervous. That is, until I found out cold calling just means getting called on in class. I’ve been getting called on in class for 17 years. No big deal.

But then I actually had my first cold call. The following is an account of my internal monologue at that moment:

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