This week, we continued our discussion of creativity with technology, but this time with a focus on composition. First, we read in the textbook about composition with students and technology, including finding five reasons why composition is an important part of a child's music education, the usefulness of critique and revision (which is something I think is very important for students to learn), and the importance of developing audiation skills, which happens with both graphic-oriented software like GarageBand and notation-based software like Finale, since students can hear the music and watch a cursor follow it. There was also a list of helpful music composition and improvisation activities that could be used in the classroom, of which I have done some already and plan to do in the future.
In our discussion board, we discussed the use of NTM classes. The primary discussion seemed to be based in the concern for money or resources to create courses like this for students in middle and high school and the concern that completely technology-based music courses will be an "easy fix" for students, who will not learn to understand the hard work and dedication that it takes to master an instrument like the ensemble participation students would learn. It was an enlightening discussion.
We also spent time on twitter and google plus interacting with our PLNs. I found an article about why music is important that was aimed toward music advocacy with administrators, which I found to be very helpful. Both our principal and assistant principal are leaving at the end of this year, and I want to make sure I am ready to support music in case the new administration does not value it the way my current administrators do. I also found an excellent blog called "Beth's Music Notes" that includes great music lesson plans. I would love to have a blog just like that, completely full of music lesson plan ideas and resources for other teachers.
The next part of our coursework this week involved lynda.com. It was a course on Principles of Audio in music, and it was very interesting. The course explain a lot of basic ideas about audio and the way it works. Most of it was completely over my head. I tried to watch and follow along, and the instructor did a great job trying to simplify things, but I simply do not have enough background knowledge to really understand what he was talking about. I did understand the portion about waveform, I was pleased to realize. I understood the concepts of higher quality sound as well, but I did not understand the "whys" of the terminology, such as the language.
We also completed the soundation project. I found it to be pretty similar to GarageBand, which I have used quite a lot. In some ways, it was easier to use than GarageBand, but in other ways, I had trouble figuring out how to do things since it worked differently from GarageBand. I found Soundation to be rather limiting since I could not record my own voice without paying for a subscription. I will likely do some kind of composition/arranging project in Soundation with my students using loops, although I think I liked Incredibox better.
Here are references for the websites I mentioned and materials I read:
Soundation
My Soundation Song
Lynda
Beth's Music Notes
Bauer, W.I. (2014). Music Learning Today. New York, NY: Oxford.
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