Week 7

This week in class was all about assessment and productivity.  In my county, assessment is very heavily pressed- even at the elementary level.  Our students in 3-5 spend roughly a month worth of school every year on standardized tests- that does not even include their tests in class.  Our K-2 students still spend about 2 weeks worth of school a year on standardized tests.  Specials classes are no different either.  Every time we have a meeting at school, principals are asking for data for our classes and the tests to back it up.  Many of my students have test anxiety because of this- some even totally freeze up when going to take a test because of the fear of failure.  Because of this, I spend a lot of time doing informal assessments in class- and if they are being officially tested, we sometimes treat it just like any other class.  For example, last week, my third graders were practicing their skips and steps using solfege syllables.  We had a quiz on this topic but students had no idea they were being tested.

According to the reading, one of the most important components of assessment is feedback.  It should be corrective, timely, specific, and sometimes allow students to give the feedback.  I do agree with all of these statements- especially in a music classroom.  Feedback is incredibly important for young musicians to improve.  If they learn a skill, hand position, embouchure, or even posture wrong, it is that much harder to correct the skill later down the road.  If a teacher notices something during assessment (or even during class), it is imperative to have timely, corrective, and specific feedback.  It is also important for students to give feedback on their own performances/assessments.  I believe the best way for this to happen is by videotaping it and allowing them to see and critique it.  This allows for the student to see improvement and if they have reached the learning outcomes.  Students can then set goals for further improvement in certain skills.

The other main topic of discussion this week was professional productivity.  I use many different tools to do this- many of which I found most other students in my class use as well.  I consider these to be some of the more common examples of productivity that I think most are already using such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint (as well as their Apple equivalents), a digital calendar, digital audio/video recorders, programs such as Remind101, file sharing programs like DropBox, and the different components of Office365 like their calendars and OneDrive.  However, I think my favorite productivity tool I discovered for this school year is an app called TeacherKit.  Before this year, I would always have two oversized clipboards with all my seating chart/grade trackers for each school.

This held all of my lesson dates and what we did for every quarter as well as allowing me to track student grades, absences, and behaviors for each week.  The downfall though, was that every quarter I had to rewrite 36 classes and 1100 names on brand new sheets.  Most of my student’s names are too long to input into the computer without totally losing the format of the document.  It got to be too much to keep up with between two schools.  Upon discovering TeacherKit, I was able to do all of the above, as well as adding pictures for each of my students.  Now all of my information is in one place for all 36 classes and it automatically configures grades, absences, and behavior reports throughout the entire year.  In addition, I have the option to enter parent contact information and send emails to them at the touch of a button.  It has made things much more smooth this year only having to carry around an Ipad as opposed to two giant clipboards filled with papers. It also allows me to change seating charts whenever needed, allowing for better classroom management.

I have also spent a lot of time this week working on my Webquest, which I am proud to say, is completely finished- a little early!! Aliens and their Instruments Webquest

This was an enjoyable project.  The hardest part for me was coming up with a story to hook the students.  Some things that were suggested to incorporate such as a Google Forms quiz or creating their project with a word processor, I was unable to realistically do because I wrote my Webquest for 3^rd graders.  They are currently unable to even login to their school emails- much less fill navigate a quiz online, or create a table in Word.  Though their information would be recorded offline, I was still able to incorporate a Google Slides presentation into the site to display listening examples for each instrument embedded from Youtube.  I found this to be a much more efficient way to expose my students to listening examples as opposed to embedding them directly into the Webquest and taking up a lot of space.

Overall, I found this to be a great project- along with pretty much everything else we have done in this class.  Google Sites was easy to navigate after exploring the tutorials on Lynda.com,  and I think it allowed for my project to turn out very well.  Over the past 8 weeks, I have learned so much from this course, and honestly, I could not think of a better introduction into the grad program at UF.

Week 6

This week, there was a ton of useful information in our reading.  It focused a lot of how students learn and how we are able to support that as educators, as well as discussed the differences between copyright, public domain, and creative commons.

According to the reading, “Driscoll (2002) describes learning as contextual, active, social, and reflective.  Collectively these ideas are often referred to as constructivism, a word stemming from the belief that learning is a process of constructing knowledge.” (Bauer, p. 147).  Contextual learning is simply the concept that students learn new material via the context in which it is presented.  This activates their prior knowledge, where they are able to connect the new information to the old information they already know.  For many students learning is also active.  Thankfully, with music, our classes are generally very activity oriented already.  It’s a proven fact that people learn by doing and our role, as an educator, is to facilitate this.  Another aspect of a student’s learning is the social interactions.  Through interactions with others, students can move to a higher level of understanding.  The final aspect of Driscoll’s learning is reflection.  Through reflection, students are able to be more independent in terms of their learning.  Reflection assists in helping them set goals and monitor their progress towards those goals.

Another topic discussed this week was Project Based Learning (PBL). I believe that PBL is an integral part of music classrooms, especially in general music.  I try to incorporate at least one project per year in my 3-5 classes.  Generally, with these projects I also try to use music that is popular at the time, or something I am certain they would be interested in.  In the past, I have done a STOMP Project with my 5^th graders, where we work in groups and use recyclable materials or trash to create a composition.  I have also done radio stories, recorder composition projects, and a cup song project to a pop song of their choice.  Some of these projects took two weeks of class; some took a little over a month.  I have found that these kinds of projects are always a big hit with my students.  They enjoy being able to be social and creating something they can connect with.

In my opinion, the most important thing we learned about this week in the reading was the concept of Backwards Design.  This is how I have always been taught to plan my lessons and it is so useful.  On my discussion post this week, someone replied with the comment “You wouldn’t plan a vacation without knowing the destination”.   The same is so true for teaching.  Why would we plan a lesson if we do not know what we want the students to learn?  According to the reading, backwards design has three stages:

“ 1. Identifying desired student learning results (learning outcomes);

2. selecting the evidence that will be needed to determine whether the students have          learned (means of assessment); and

3. planning learning experiences (activities and instructional procedures)” (Bauer, p152)

I think the biggest factor in being able to successfully design and implement a lesson for students using this method is by simply knowing our students.  If we know them and how they learn, we are better able to establish learning outcomes for them.  It will also make it easier to decide what sort of activities will best help them achieve this goal.

One final concept I found to be important this week was copyright, public domain, and creative commons.  I had already known about copyright and public domain.  Creative commons, however, was a totally new concept that I couldn’t believe I had never heard of before now.  In my undergraduate courses they very briefly taught us about copyright. And by very briefly, I mean, they gave us a list of “Do not do these”, then we never saw or heard about it again until it was on the PLT teaching exam.  Copyright was always just this scary entity where we all knew if we messed up, we could get in a lot of trouble.  I did know about Public Domain to the extent that I knew that is where things ended up after a certain number of years past the copyright date.  More recently, in the news, there was the story about the song “Happy Birthday” being entered into Public Domain.  I always just considered this the safe zone.  After learning about Creative Commons this week, my perspective on copyright has changed.  It is a big relief to know that there are people out there who understand that even though something they created might work perfectly for them, that may not be the case for others.  No student learns the same, and as an educator, if we are able to find work that can be altered or changed to fit our needs, it opens up so many doors to facilitate the success of our students.  Granted, not every work under Creative Commons can be altered depending on which of the six licenses is being used, but there are still many more options available.

My goal over the last couple weeks of this class is to incorporate Creative Commons and Public Domain into my WebQuest project.  Last week, I reviewed a music software website called “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” which is a game about the instruments of the orchestra based on Benjamin Britten’s composition by the same name.  Following suit with learning about instruments, I have decided to make my WebQuest about instruments and their families.  I am hoping this project will lead to me becoming more familiar with Creative Commons and the Public Domain so that I may incorporate more resources from these sources into my lessons at school.

Week 5

This week, we have spent a lot of time learning/discussing about students responding to music. I find this one of the most important aspects of music. If someone does not enjoy music enough to at least have an opinion about what they are hearing, why bother at all? As teachers, I believe one of our main goals is to develop a students ear and provoke thoughts about music. Of course I want my students to be able to tell me things about the melodies they hear, the form, instruments and rhythms used, style, and culture of the music we listen to. But, I also want them to have an opinion about what they hear- How does it make them feel? What does it make them think of? Is it enjoyable to listen to? How do the specifics they are hearing (such as form, melodies, instruments, rhythms) affect their listening experience? All of these are incredibly important questions as well. It is important to understand music technically, but it is also important to understand the music within yourself.

One of the best ways I have found to encourage this learning is by tying things to music my students already know and love. If you can get a student to understand some of the more theoretical concepts such as form through a popular song, they will be more likely to actually have some thoughts when they hear music that is different from what is common for them. One program we learned about this week that can help achieve this is www.zaption.com . Through Zaption, you can create Interactive Videos that can be accessed by students at school or at home. You have the ability to create slides that will either pause the music and ask a question or slide out and inform the listener of what you want them to know while listening.

This week, I used Zaption to create a review video for my students about form. Every spring when we begin reviewing certain topics, I take some time to work on some cup songs with my 4th and 5th graders. Cups are a very inexpensive instrument to purchase, and my students adore learning the different patterns and the success they feel when they are able to put it together as a class. Generally this is a time that I try to gear towards what they enjoy hearing. I have a cup song for Cotton Eyed Joe, but this past year I added one in using "Happy" by Pharrell. I was impressed with how much of a hit this was with my students. Usually we spend half of a class reviewing concepts heard in the song and discussing the form, then spend some time learning the patterns with cups. On the second week, we practice the patterns and put it together. The reviews tend to be a lot of me talking, so Zaption is a great way to efficiently review what I want them to know. The videos on Zaption could be viewed at school individually in a lab or in small groups, and discussed as a class.

Below is my video that I created for Zaption to review form.
In addition to Zaption, we also reviewed a music software program or website. I chose to review Carnegie Hall’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”.

It is a website I used with my 2nd graders every year and every year after they still ask about “the orchestra game”. Using a safari theme to find instruments, a girl named Violet finds each instrument of the “extinct” symphony orchestra and learns about each one along the way. It teaches the students about the orchestra as a whole, the families of the orchestra, and each individual instrument.

The game is incredibly interactive and could be used at home individually, or as a full class activity. If at home, the student simply creates a secret username and password (no personal information is required), or a teacher will create a class username and password. I would highly recommend this software to anybody in an elementary music classroom. Students enjoy interacting with the IWB (Interactive Whiteboard), and for the most part, if the students have experience with an IWB, the game is self-run. The teacher simply facilitates discussions about what they are hearing from each instrument and assists with the games as needed.

Tools such as Zaption and YPGO are great tools to enhance a students listening. With Zaption you can create a guided listening environment for the students, whether it be songs they already know, or songs you want them to hear. With YPGO, it teaches the students along the way about the sounds of different instruments as well as important concepts such as theme and variations.

In our readings this week, one passage about listening really stood out to me. It said, “Students frequently differentiate between the music they experience in and out of school, expressing a preference for listening to music at home. School music is often perceived as passive and difficult, with students indicating they engage with it to please their parents and teachers. At home, they are able to listen in private and can choose what they will listen to. Students often use music as a means of emotional regulation while at home.” (pp. 107). If we as teachers can connect to students musically by tying our standards and curriculum into things they enjoy such as pop music and video games, we should take advantage of it. If we can use that same music they enjoy to invoke deeper thoughts about what they are hearing, I think it is even better. If we can connect to what they want to know and learn, they will probably have these same thoughts when they are listening for enjoyment at home. Musically, if we can engage them in class with music they know and appreciate, I believe we are more likely to have a chance to engage them in the music they perceive as passive and difficult.

Week 4

This week’s reading was all about music performance.  The main objectives from the chapter that stood out to me were the research and practices leading to skills and knowledge and the affordances and constraints of technology with application to performance.

There are so many factors involved in acquiring performance skills, including practice, motivation, modeling, and feedback.  It should go without saying that practice is crucial in learning a skill.  Simply spending a lot of time practicing does not make a great musician, but rather the quality of practice as well.  If a student studies for a test for hours on end, they are less likely to retain the information than if they break up the studying into smaller chunks.  The same goes for practicing an instrument.  According to the reading, “The brain needs time to solidify newly developed neural networks; frequent breaks and adequate sleep are important in this process.  These breaks become even more important when the brain is dealing with complex material (Altenmuller & Schneider, 2009).” (Bauer, pp. 81).  One of the main struggles with practice, though, is motivation.  Some students need to be extrinsically motivated to practice- i.e., being rewarded for their work.  Eventually, these extrinsic motivators should be designed to encourage intrinsic motivation.  As I look back on my practice, I cannot quite remember when my motivation changed from extrinsic to intrinsic, but at long as I can remember, I have always played because of my love of music.  I loved the feeling of making music, and improving every time I practiced.  One thing that has always encouraged this is by never being given an assignment that was out of my reach.  I was very lucky to have the teachers I did because they always challenged me and pushed me to be my best.  If a student does not have this, I think it makes the switch to intrinsic motivation take longer to acquire.

Modeling and feedback are two other very important parts to acquiring performance skills.  By observing and imitating others, students are able to gain skills such as proper tone, embouchure.  As teachers, we do not always have the skills needed to be a perfect example of every instrument.  This is where technology can come into play.  It is proven that people learn better through pictures and words, so by showing students video and audio of high quality musicians and recordings, they are able to improve their own musicianship.  From here, students also need to receive feedback in order to progress.  This allows students to have an idea of their progress and set goals for where they can improve.  Feedback also includes students themselves diagnosing their own problems and coming up with solutions.  This can be done utilizing digital audio software and having the students listen to their own performance.

One example of digital audio software we learned about this week was Audacity.  In my opinion, Audacity is more of an advanced software option.  When an audio file is put into audacity, you can see the actual waveforms.  This allows you to cut sections of the recording, add various effects, and mix and edit it in numerous ways.  Once you learn the program, I think it is very user friendly.  I already have past experience with Audacity so using the program for my assignment was simple.  I think for my elementary school students, Audacity would be out of the question, but for an older student I believe it has the potential to be a great tool. 

Our assignment this week was to create a remix of “Mahna Mahna” from the Muppets Show.  I had a tougher time with this assignment simply because I am not a huge fan of remixes.  I like everything to be in order and be neat and tidy.  However, I could easily see the benefit of an assignment like this in music education.  In fact, if I taught older students, it seems like something I would assign in a classroom.  It is a great assignment to reach “the other 80%”, as well as to be used in getting the other 20% of students to think outside of the box.  Though I did not use many effects besides fading the music in my composition, a program such as Audacity allows for so much to be done to a file, both through the program itself, and by things imported by the creator.  Though this did not bother me, the only downside I found was the lengths you have to go through to share your creation.  Some may think that having to download additional software to export your file as an MP3 and then uploading it through other outlets may be too much additional work.  The advantage to other cloud-based programs we have used so far, such as Soundtrap and Noteflight are that you can share your compositions and the simple click of the mouse.

Week 3

Our main project this week was to create a composition using Soundtrap, an online Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).  I used this project to take an opportunity push myself to try something different in terms of the sounds I used throughout the project.  It was interesting to explore a new program that I am certain I will be able to use one day, when I am working with older students.  In my current situation with elementary students, I do not think a project using Soundtrap would be feasible, but with older students, it would easily attainable.  Soundtrap was easy to use and understand, and with older students, it would be a great project to have them create either using the loops provided or adding in their own music.  The ease of Soundtrap allows for a teacher to suit a project to individual student no matter their skill level.  They can give as many or as few guidelines and constraints as needed.  For example, if there is a student who does not have much musical experience (whether traditional or non-traditional), the teacher could allow only the use of loops, assign a time signature, form, and set a constraint such as only being able to choose a certain number of loops from low voices, melodies, harmonies, etc.  For a student who has a background in music or theory and has explored programs similar to Soundtrap creating their own music, the teacher could give fewer constraints and allow more student creativity.

This project though, along with everything else we have worked on in class so far, has opened up my eyes to a whole different set of tools to use in my teaching.  I have always encouraged my students to create and explore, but never with a plethora of technological use.  I find that among my other elementary colleagues, the majority of them do not focus on any composition in their classrooms.  This concept astonishes me time after time.  Teaching, to me, is about using whatever works to reach the students and allows them to better themselves as musicians.  This includes composition.  As much as we hate to admit it, technology plays a huge role in our student’s lives.  From Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter to the newest IPhone or Tablet, students are constantly connected.  Even my younger students have up-to-date smart phones they carry around in their backpacks all day.  So, why not take this to our advantage as teachers, and incorporate it into something musical?  If we can teach them to use something like Incredibox, Soundtrap, Musescore, or Noteflight, there is a much better chance that instead of scrolling through the most recent pictures on Instagram when they are bored, they might open up one of these programs and explore.  If it is something they are already so consumed with, why wouldn’t we try to tap into this?

Over the past couple weeks when talking about improvisation and composition, it has made me realize that it is possible to see them both as one in the same, or improvisation as the road leading to composition.  There are so many similarities and overlaps that many techniques for teaching the students could be used in both situations.  In both cases, the musician is creating.  In composing, the idea is written down where as many times in improvisation it is simply played.  In addition, many of the same principles used in Kratus’ model of the development of improvisational abilities can also be applied to teaching composition.  The student needs to be able to explore sounds, develop the ability to audiate, progress to very structured creation and then slowly have constraints removed.  Teachers are to encourage the student to listen, practice transcription, and give feedback on their improvisational technique.  The same could be said for composition.  Whether traditional or non-traditional, students must be able to explore different sounds first and then create with constraints given by the teacher to develop their abilities.  Bauer states that some of the guiding beliefs to inform their work [a student learning to compose] are:

“1. Using notation software develops music literacy

  2. Begin composition with structured guidelines

  3. Reflect and critique frequently

  4. Encourage revision

  5. Promote composition for the teachers

  6. Provide opportunities for live performance of student work

  7. Composition is one element of a well-rounded curriculum.” (Bauer, pp. 60)

When comparing these guidelines to the Kratus model, it is impossible to deny the similarities between improvisation and composition.   As teachers, it is our job to open up student exploration into both of these worlds, no matter the level or age.