This week, our course module was about responding to music with technology. This included topics such as teaching our students to speak intelligently about music, listen to music actively, engage in analyzing music activities, and evaluating music and music performances.
In our reading this week, the discussion was about different technologies that facilitate responding to music. There were several ideas in the text that sparked interest and ideas for me. I really like the idea of students blogging about what they are listening to. I also liked the option to give students choice about what they were listening to. Since our students have 1:1 mini laptops in 3rd and 4th grades, I am always looking for new ways to incorporate the laptops, and I think a listening journal would be a great first step. Another idea that was sparked in the reading was activities for evaluating music, especially related to the students creating the rubrics and concepts that they should be evaluating. This has been a struggle for me, as I am not sure what young students are capable of grasping, so I was not sure how in-depth I could be with the concepts. Overseeing the students creating their own rubric will help me to see what concepts they grasp. Primarily, I want our evaluations to be more musically meaningful than just "this was something we did well in the concert" and "this was something that could have been better," which has been the extent of our evaluations in the past and rather non-meaningful musically.
In our PLN this week, I actually found some evaluating worksheets for elementary students that are downloadable. If I don't want to use the exact worksheets, I can at least have an idea now how to edit them to be useful for my classroom.
Our projects for this week were to complete the music software evaluation and the social bookmarking activities. For the music software project, I evaluated The Orchestra for iPad, which I found to be an excellent app. It cost about $14, but the cost was well-worth it. Another thing I discovered in the reading this week was that Apple TV will hook the iPad up to the SmartBoard, which I did not previously know. I have Apple TV and an iPad and I have never used them in my classroom besides organizing activities and reminders for my students. The app is truly excellent for teaching the instruments in the orchestra, how they sound, and what they look like. It will greatly improve my teaching unit in this area, and I'm truly looking forward to using it. The social bookmarking activities was something with which I have been previously unfamiliar, but I found it to be very useful. I plan to keep using it because I need ways to organize what I have found. I found it very similar to Pinterest, which I use all the time, but with a rather more professional look. I will definitely continue to use it.
In our discussion board this week, we discussed activities that involve responding to music in our classroom and how we can incorporate technology into those. Many students came up with excellent ideas for using technology in new ways. I'm going to try to incorporate several new things related to music responding and technology. I will try creating a listening map on the ActivBoard with my students so that we can all follow along, and perhaps involving the students in developing the listening map and choosing the pictures to accompany it. I also want to do activities where the students choose from a list of music which pieces to listen to, and then we put together presentations as a class about the different pieces that we chose. Each student could individually analyze their chosen piece and write about it. This would be great to use on the individual laptops that my students have access to. Students could also get writing practice in by typing their reports on the mini laptops. The discussion board was very helpful with getting ideas of all types for students of all ages. One area where I'd really like to improve is getting my students to evaluate music using musical terms. My students all say things like "that was good" or "I didn't like that" instead of giving valid musical reasons for their opinions of the performance. Including technology into these practices and ideas could help to engage students, especially because of the generation they are growing up in, more deeply into their evaluating activities.
Bauer, W.I. (2014). Music Learning Today. New York, NY: Oxford.
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