Microsoft OneNote Post

As I read Dr. Bazan’s blog, I admit my guilt in being a teacher that associates with using Google Drive. I use Google Drive for the majority of my work as a teacher (e.g. lesson plans and powerpoints), and as a graduate school student. I had never heard of OneNote until looking into for this week’s assignment. The are many aspects for this program that I see myself using in my classroom. The ability to organize all educational aspects (e.g. lesson plans, homeworks, email) for your classroom in one place seems to be the ideal situation for any teacher. With all these wonderful aspects, the one I find invaluable is the ability to develop interactive lessons for my students. Click on me in order to set this up for your classroom. The ability to complete these interactive lessons has influenced me to implement them with my substitute plans. I can see this making my life tremendously easier if I ever become sick and have to send plans to a substitute.

Week 7 Reading/Viewing Reflection

Technology for Music Teaching & Learning has offered invaluable ways to implement technology into my classroom. However, offering technological methods for continued professional development is what I will find most valuable. Every year I attend the Massachusetts Music Educators Association (MMEA) All-State Music Conference. It is a professional development weekend (Thursday through Saturday) for educators, and is connected to the All-State Music Festival for high school students. Other than this weekend, there are not many other professional development opportunities that would be as valuable for me.

Attending these one hour sessions at the professional conferences is always valuable, but developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN) I believe is the most beneficial of all. I find it interesting that prior to this class, I had developed a kind of PLN through Facebook. I have liked many professional groups on Facebook (e.g. National Association for Music Education) and now am receiving posts on my news feed of the newest developments from these groups. I am interested in developing my PLN, and joining “communities of practice” through Google, Facebook, and any other forms of social media (Bauer, 2014, p. 176). There are so many benefits to having a PLN, including the ability to search for anything that you need to know. When I started teaching my History of Rock and Roll class I was absolutely lost on where to start developing my curriculum. I was lucky to have colleagues in the History department at Westport High School that sent me to the Education page of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This website led me to endless lesson plans that I was able to use as I developed my curriculum. I have to admit I am confused about the concept of “real simple syndication” (RSS) (Bauer, 2014, p. 175). I am unsure how RSS enables notifications for my PLN. I plan on doing some research on how this concept works and plan on using this technology to help me develop more ideas for my classroom.

Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) has become a necessity for all teachers. How educators teach in the 21st century will never be the same now that technology is a part our everyday life. I found the results of Bauer’s TPACK study interesting as far as the levels of competence that music teachers thought were important. I have to agree with the order of competencies that music teachers should have. However, I would have thought that knowledge of technology would have been higher on the list of necessary competencies. I wonder if this study would look any different if someone were to repeat it in 20 years? The way that technology has developed over the last 20 years I would hypothesize that these levels would change at least slightly if this study were to be repeated in another 20 years.

Week 6 Reading/Viewing Reflection

A common thread throughout this course for me has been the concept of how I can reach the percentage of students who are not in my performance ensembles. The reading this week has given me creative solutions on how I can do this. I realize that I have driven students away from my music elective classes like History of Rock and Roll due to not embracing the music that they enjoy. I have realized through teaching History of Rock and Roll that musical preference plays a substantial role in the life of our students. I spend the first day of class having a conversation about what types of music these students enjoy. My experience with these conversations proves that students musical preferences “are a result of ‘cultural, historical, societal, familial, and peer-group background’” (Bauer, 2014, p. 105).

The difficulty I have with this conversation is how I can connect this conversation with the predetermined curriculum for this class. Often times the music that these students enjoy listening to are not styles of Rock and Roll covered in this class. However, this reading allowed me to develop ideas of how these students can share the music that they enjoy. Having students develop blogs create endless possibilities of what these students can learn. Kerstetter (2010) suggests that blogs can be developed to reflect on “personal listening experiences,” “classroom listening,” and “performances attended” (Bauer, 2014, p. 113). Kerstetter (2010) also suggests that a blog could be developed to “compare and contrast two different compositions or different versions of a performance of a composition” (Bauer, 2014, p. 113). I detail these blogging options due to my intention of including these blogging ideas into my History of Rock and Roll class this school year. Once students have developed their blog I will have them develop weekly blog posts reflecting on a personal musical experience, music that was listened to in class, or about a performance they have attended or are going to attend. I also plan on assigning a blog assignment where students will critically compare and contrast a song that was covered in class to a song from one of their favorite artists.

Another difficulty I have with reaching students in my History of Rock and Roll class is how I can teach them to become “lifelong music listeners” (Bauer, 2014, p. 109). I have been influenced through the reading this week to develop my students “analytical ear” (Bauer, 2014, p. 109). I liked the idea of using Powerpoint presentations as a listening map by syncing the presentation to change slides at certain points of the song. It is a wonderful tool in teaching students to analyze music. I plan on using this method when introducing the blues progression in my History of Rock and Roll class. I will start the song by having the first slide play through an entire chorus of the blues progression. Each subsequent slide will then be each individual chord of the form with the Roman numeral of the representative chord. I will then alternate between these two methods of introducing the form for the remainder of the song. The intention of this method will be to have students distinguish whether or not a song contains the blues progression.  

As I become familiar with the concept of WebQuests, I find how useful it can be in my curriculum. Many of the units that I teach in my History of Rock and Roll class can be transferred to a Webquest (e.g. Blues progression, influential early rock and roll musicians, the British invasion). The Webquest project for this class I will develop a WebQuest teaching students about the blues progression and intend on including the powerpoint mentioned earlier. The process of this WebQuest will include students learning the social and cultural influences of the blues, and learning exactly what the blues progression is. The evaluation of student understanding will be in the form of student compositions using Mixcraft or GarageBand, and a written assessment where students will distinguish songs containing the blues progression from songs not containing the blues progression. I am excited to develop and implement this WebQuest for this coming school year.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Week 5 Reading/Viewing Reflection

The ability to assess students in technological ways resonated with me this week. Having valid and reliable methods of assessing students while being able to retain students in my program is difficult. I find that most of my performance ensemble students are willing to be assessed because they understand that assessments are part of being in school. However, a percentage of my performance ensemble students are involved in the music program purely because they enjoy being involved but want no part of being assessed. Developing creative methods of assessments would be helpful in assessing these students.

SmartMusic, audio-visual assessments, and recording software are three methods in which students can be assessed in a valid and reliable way while still having fun. Of these methods, SmartMusic would be the formal assessment method of the three. However, balancing technical exercises with fun activities would still allow my students enjoyment in using technology. Audio-visual assessments can be equally, if not more; valuable, valid, and reliable than SmartMusic. Audio-visual assessment adds aspects of assessment that can not be assessed in SmartMusic. Video assessment is able to assess visual aspects like posture, facial expression, and the visual aspects of breath support where SmartMusic is unable to capture these aspects. I see videorecording chorus rehearsals as a valuable formative assessment because it allows students to critically see the visual aspects of their performance. Recording software like Audacity or GarageBand can be an alternative to SmartMusic. It would allow students to record themselves, convert the file to a more user-friendly file type (e.g. mp3) and submit this file for assessment. This is how I currently grade students in my piano class. Every station in the piano lab is connected to a Mac mini and has internet connection. When the student has recorded a song to be assessed in GarageBand, they convert the GarageBand file to an mp3. They then upload the mp3 file to a shared folder in Google drive. Once they have uploaded the mp3 I can listen to the performance and provide formative/summative feedback according to the rubrics that was provide them with on the first day of class. 

I was glad to read the section on Backward Design as it is a concept my school district has adopted. As a first-year teacher, having never heard of this concept, was worried about applying this concept in my classroom. After four years I have become comfortable with developing new units of instruction according to this curriculum model. I can see how this model can be applied to learning being “contextual, active, social, and reflective” (Bauer, 2014, p. 147). Building lessons within your units of instruction in Backward Design accommodating these learning styles ultimately leads to self-regulation. Self-regulation is a concept that has been a goal in my professional career. The philosophy I have developed over the years of being a private instructor and a public school teacher is to teach my students to become independent musicians. If students are not able to self-regulate their abilities as a musician, then they will never be able to become a lifelong musician. They will always have to rely on someone else to tell them what they are doing correctly or incorrectly. Implementing assessment methods like SmartMusic, audio-visual recordings, and recording software is one way in developing the independent musicians that I hope to develop. Not only is it a way I can give them a grade for my class, it is also a way they can assess their own performances after they leave high school.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.