Sunday, April 6, 2014

Week 5

In this week's coursework, we were exposed to a variety of activities, all of which hold high value in the music education classroom. 

In our discussion this week, we were prompted to reflect on how we use technology to elicit student response to music.  As with much of this course, having to reflect on what we do or do not do brings us to the realization that we implement technology in our classrooms more than we understand.  As stated in the discussion board post, I use YouTube to generate listening guides and reflections for my students.  There are so many high quality videos of master teachers/conductors, professional performing ensembles and the like, it would be virtually impossible to run out of things to distribute to the students.  As a result of a one of these listening assignments, I had a student create this image for me - I'm so humbled by and proud of this, I cannot resist sharing as often as possible:

This student was impacted by the listening in this fashion - only by being asked to sketch something if visual imagery comes to mind.  I was anticipating animals, landscape, colors and things like that; but was presented with this.  AMAZING!  This and many other online resources can be used to supplement instruction, plus give the students the access to many of the pieces that they are playing in class every day, being played by the finest musicians. 

The other educational components of this week's materials was the Instructional Software Evaluation and the Social Bookmarking project.  The Instructional Software Evaluation was very useful, because it required that we searched, in-depth for effective means of instruction and/or assessment via technology.  Since I teach secondary school exclusively, I selected to evaluate the SmartMusic program because of its value to the secondary school band classroom.  This program provides such a valuable resource for the students AND the instructors.  Its objectivity in assessment provides concrete feedback to the students and measurable data for the administration. 

Social Bookmarking is something that I had never heard of until now, and I'm glad it was introduced.  This makes perfect sense for all of us who are using online information to create or modify instruction, or to those who use web pages to enhance the students' learning.  This type of categorization makes for a quick and easy way to access what you need when you need it.  Along with this, to complete the project, we had to seek out resources either on the internet by ourselves, or using web pages or links provided for us.  There were many resources that I saw that I did not know existed, so the search alone was very educational. 

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