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.