Technology Use for Administrating and Learning

Reflections for Week 7...

The video and reading for this week was a great summary of the last couple of years of teaching and administrating for me on a personal level and of the last seven weeks in this class.

I consider myself to be a very organized person. Running a program that is spread out over 13 schools doesn’t really allow for any other option. A huge part of that organization is due to technology. During my 17 years of teaching so far, I’ve done a lot with word processors, spreadsheets, and the website provided by our school, but things have really moved rapidly since I moved to a different school four years ago. I used to carry my professional life on a flash drive and was often worried I’d lose it. One day I forgot it at home and a co-worker introduced me to DropBox. That changed things significantly for me. Over the last year and a half or so, I’ve been slowly moving things over to Google Drive, which has taken things to another level with the sharing of documents and collaboration I’m able to do, in addition to being able to access everything from any computer, my iPad, or my phone.

My use of our little chunk of the internet has expanded over the years to including lists of student achievements over the course of the year, sample recordings of the pieces we’re working on, copies of parent notes and emails that were sent, and more recently a Google Calendar of all our events for the year. It’s been great to have all that information in one spot. Within the last two years I also started a Facebook page for our band program and a blog. We’ll see about adding Twitter…

From a professional development standpoint, technology has been amazing. I’ve been searching for a way to work toward my master’s degree for a number of years. With four children at home, the last thing I wanted to do was disappear for weeks at a time over the summer. With my responsibilities at school and the administration of my program, there’s really no way I could do a program that would require evening classes. I asked the many, many folks in the Band Directors Group on Facebook if anyone had any thoughts on the various online degree programs and this program at Kent State was the clear winner. While there have been some very crazy weeks with teaching and “going” to school at the same time, this program has been just what I needed.

This class in particular has been very eye opening. I’ve always wondered about RSS feeds and how that worked and I’m very glad I now know. The time Feedly has saved me in bringing all my news to me instead of me going out to look for news has been great. Taking the time to go look for new things to explore has always been a daunting task and now I feel like new ideas are coming to me instead. How great is that?!

At the end of each course, when I am asked to journal my thoughts on ideas for my Capstone Project, I always include three things, none of which seem to really jump out ahead of the rest: music technology, assessment, and curriculum development. I think that this class has given me what I had thought I would have to spend a lot more time reading about, thinking about, and exploring in the world of music technology. I know there’s a lot more out there, but I feel like I now have the resources to find that on my own. I think I’ve now got it narrowed down to only two choices, with four courses left to go before I need to decide for sure. We’ll see how that turns out...

Reflections on OneNote

OneNote looks to be an incredibly useful tool for creating, sharing and collaborating online - both with fellow teachers and with students. It’s a way to organize everything you need for exploration, preparation, teaching, and followup all in one place. It can be used to teach in a very engaging way using text, pictures, audio, and video and can even be used to quiz and test on the material.

OneNote is cross-platform and can be synced to multiple devices, making it something that’s easy to access from almost anywhere. While it does seem there would be quite a learning curve to figuring out all OneNote has to offer, there are a number of tutorial videos to help you interactively see how things work.

Our school has been moving things into the Google Suite over the last couple of years, including more encouragement to use Google Classroom this year. Because of my unique teaching situation and having students spread out through 13 different schools, that hasn’t really been an option for me since all users need to have the same domain name in their email address. I think OneNote would allow me to connect with all of my students in one place.

I created an example of how I could use OneNote to give my students an opportunity to explore something coming up in one of our weekly rehearsals in advance of the rehearsal itself. In the example below, I include a couple of links to information about Cut Time and some specific of examples of rhythms we’re going to work on in a new piece of music that will be handed out at rehearsal. This gives students a chance to come to rehearsal with some background knowledge and a preview of some of the rhythms we’ll be working on.

Click here to see the full Pre-Rehearsal Cut Time Page

So Many Things to Explore, So Little Time...

Reflections for Week 6...

There were a number of things in the reading for this week that I’ve never even heard of before, and some things I’ve used or experienced quite a bit. I now have a nice new list of things I will be checking out over the summer as well!

I found the section on human response to music to be very interesting. There was a list of ways people respond to music and I can easily say that I’ve experienced every one of these. At live concerts, I've experienced physiological changes in heart rate and breathing when the lights go down and the music starts and I’ve had motor responses there too (air drumming counts, right?). I’ve been intellectually stimulated by twists of phrase in lyrics or the sheer musicianship in front of me on the stage. I’ve experience aesthetic and emotional reactions to music and have used music to help alter my mood when I needed a pick-me-up. It’s amazing that certain songs can take me back to very specific memories of events, some of which aren’t even really particularly interesting, from when I was as young as 5 or 6 years old.

This very much got me thinking about teaching my students how to listen. I’ve used professional recordings in rehearsals to show my students what we’re aiming for when we perform. We’ve talked about what we hear in the recordings and make a list of things we want to work on. Some students seem to have an easy time with this while others struggle and don’t really seem to know what to listen for. This is something I hope to work on in the future. I’ve never seen call charts or listening maps before. I don’t if a group of these exist for middle school band pieces already or if I’d have to create my own. There were a number of good suggestions in the text if I do need to make my own. If anyone knows of any that are already out there, please let me know!

There are a number of great future project ideas that I would like to explore moving forward. I like the idea of having students create a Spotify playlist and sharing it with the rest of the group. I think it would be neat to see what students enjoy listening to and some people may be introduced to new music they didn’t even know existed. I’d like to have my students write a short paper on their favorite musical artist or a favorite composer. I’m thinking the former would be much easier for them. I used musictheory.net in my one year of teaching high school level music theory, and there’s no reason I couldn’t set up some easy lessons and/or quizzes for my elementary school band students as well. I think this would be a great way for them to learn more about music theory, and they could move at their own pace.

My growing list of things to check out from this week include HyperHistory Online, Smithsonian Folkways, Smithsonian Global Sound Library, and delving further into WebQuests. There are so many great ideas to explore, and so little time!

Instructional Design and Assessment

Reflections for Week 5...

The readings and videos for this week covered two of the areas I’m considering for my Capstone Project at the end of my degree - curriculum and assessment. My 5th-8th grade band program is a program without a home. I am employed by a high school to run a program that serves 13 local K-8 schools. Students get a 20-minute lesson each week at their school and meet with the students from the other schools at the high school on Monday evenings for a full band experience. Because of this unique arrangement, and not really being a part of the high school or the individual elementary schools, things like curriculum and grading aren’t currently included in an official capacity.

Limited contact with my students makes many projects and things of that nature difficult to include. My music selection is usually dictated by what I would like to cover with my students over the course of the year - mainly looking at time signatures, key signatures, styles, and things of that nature. Last year I actually sat down and filled out a curriculum map that the “regular” teachers use and found it very enlightening as I filled out the different areas and looked for things that I might be missing in my quest to cover as many areas as possible over the course of the year. I never considered this to be a backward design since it’s the way I’ve always done my repertoire planning. I think rehearsal and performance groups lend themselves to this kind of design quite well. Last year I had the opportunity to teach an upper-level music theory course at the high school. After 15 years of teaching only private lessons and a weekly rehearsal, this was my first time in a regular classroom. I taught that class in the opposite direction, mainly focusing on the path of the textbook, with slight modifications along the way, rather than letting the end goals dictate the path. I did make use of Finale for ear training and rhythmic dictation quizzes as well as musictheory.net, among other websites, to augment along the way. I’m looking forward to exploring curriculum more in the next few years to see how I can do a better job of including other projects and aspects of learning into my teaching.

Assessment in my teaching situation has always been interesting. With the major focus of my program being private lessons, I get to give immediate feedback to my students all day, every day. I give them my thoughts on what went well and what needs improvement, and often ask them to do the same. I find it difficult to get middle school aged students to compliment themselves. They’re quick to point out all their mistakes, but often struggle to find something that went well, even when they’re doing a great job. I think it’s good to get them to find the positives too!

On the technology side, we use tuners and metronomes (usually apps, not standalone devices) for feedback in lessons and many students ask for suggestions for apps for their own devices at home as well. I’ve been using SmartMusic quite a bit for the last few years, sometimes more as a play along tool in lessons than an assessment tool, but a number of students have it at home. With those students, I do use it for assessment. Teaching in 13 different schools and having no control over the computers in those schools, it’s difficult to set up any kind of SmartMusic station for students to use without me present.

This year I’ve expanded the ways students give me feedback on their own playing and on the playing of others. My students fill out exit tickets after our Monday evening rehearsals where they list what we did best as a group, what they personally improved the most on, what they think we as a group need to focus on next time, and what they’re going to work on at home on their own. There is a list of words at the bottom (dynamics, style, articulation, etc.) that they are asked to include in their responses. They can earn points for our yearly awards by going to other concerts and performances and in the past they just needed a note from a parent saying they went. This year I set up a Google Form that they fill out where they tell me more about the concert, what they liked, and what they thought the group could do better. It’s been neat to see into their musical minds this year!

Unfortunately, none of these fall into a grading scheme, so not everyone participates, but I’m thankful that many students do. If you have ideas for more ways I can include feedback and self-assessment for my students, please let me know!

Reflections on Chromatik and SmartMusic

I’m glad the assignment for this week said to “professionally and/or objectively review both Chromatik and SmartMusic,” because I’ve spent the last four years using SmartMusic and have only had a couple of days to experiment with the current version of Chromatik. While I can speak to the features of both SmartMusic and Chromatik, the vast amount of experience I’ve had with one over the other will most likely show some bias. Chromatik

I actually did some testing and experimenting for Chromatik before it was made available to the public a few years ago. At the time, there were some exciting features to connect teachers and their students in the works, but I was sad to see that side of it is no longer part of what they offer. For this current testing and experimentation, I worked on the website version and the iPad version. Both are able to access the same listing of pieces, including a wide variety of styles and eras. The majority of this is popular music but there is a small amount of classical literature for each instrument included.

It was interesting that there were quite a few differences between the two versions of Chromatik. The website version seems to be essentially a play-along tool. There is a nice loop feature included in the website version that allows the user to select a portion of a piece to work on over and over. The iPad version offers many more features. It includes a metronome and tuner, has the ability to record audio or video, and allows you to share a sample of your recording in the Stage section so others can see your work. It also includes a practice log that keeps track of the number of practice sessions and the amount of time spent practicing on each song. There is also a nice annotation feature that allows you to mark up the music with text, writing, and highlighting.

SmartMusic

I’ve been using SmartMusic in my band program for about four years. I’ve used it in private lessons and with small and large groups of students all at once. The iPad version of SmartMusic is new this year and has been a great addition to what they offer. Most of the students that use SmartMusic at home prefer the iPad version to the computer version. Both versions have access to the same library of songs and exercises. The layout is a bit different between the two, but the features are the same.

SmartMusic includes a tuner and a metronome. It allows you to set a section for practice looping and you can set how many times you’d like it to loop before it stops. The speed of the music can be altered in either direction. If you’d like to practice a part slower, you can do that. If you want to speed something up, you can do that as well. SmartMusic can be used as a play-back tool and it allows you to turn on and off both the accompaniment and the solo track. Clicking on the notes brings up the possible fingerings for the note on your instrument. SmartMusic is not only a play-along tool, it’s an assessment tool as well. After you play through a song or exercise, the notes turn green (if they’re correct) or red (if they’re not). Not only can you see where mistakes were made, but you can see what note was played instead of the correct note and you can see the rhythm that was played if it was incorrect. This gives students instant feedback without having to wait for a teacher.

SmartMusic includes a large number of method books including books for beginners all the way through to college music majors. There are hundreds of pieces of solo literature, a growing number of full ensemble pieces, and exercises for scales, technique, and sight-reading. Since SmartMusic is made by the same people that make Finale, you can also create your own exercises using Finale and import them into SmartMusic. These files will have all the same capabilities and features as the pieces that come with SmartMusic.

There are a number of teacher tools included as well. Teachers can assign individual songs to students or create units and assign groups of exercises and songs that way. When students submit assignments, the teacher receives a copy of the green and red note graph as well as a recording to listen to. The teacher can then send feedback on the recording back to the student.

Comparison and Summary

Chromatik and SmartMusic are great practice tools that can be used on both computers and iPads. There are a number of features that are common to both, depending on the version you use. The iPad versions for both include a tuner and a metronome and allow students to make a recording that can be shared, although in different ways. SmartMusic and the web version of Chromatik allow you to loop sections for focused practice. Both take a little bit of exploration to navigate, but they seem fairly intuitive and easy to use once it’s all figured out.

Chromatik seems to be focused more on the practice end while SmartMusic can be used that way, but also includes assessment for immediate feedback. Chromatik has a wider variety of popular music, while SmartMusic has a lot more to offer in the area of classical repertoire and exercises. Chromatik is free, while SmartMusic carries a yearly subscription fee of around $40.

Chromatik offers a great practice tool at a price that can’t be beat! It does have some limitations and doesn’t offer nearly what SmartMusic does, but it can be a very useful tool for music students. As a band director, I think SmartMusic is well worth the $40 fee. The variety of music included, the instant feedback for students using it at home, and the teacher-to-student connections that can be set up are phenomenal. If you’re a student looking for a different way to practice, or a teacher looking for a new way to motivate your students to practice, both of these programs are worth checking out!

Technology for Individual and Group Practice

Reflections for Week 4...

The readings and videos for this week contained so much good information for incorporating technology in the process of practicing and performing. There are things I have incorporated into my program in the last few years, but there are a also a number of things that I have planned to do, but have not yet completed, and the information for this week has now added to that list.

The method book we use with our beginning band students comes with a DVD that has a number of videos on it, including some great modeling of assembly, breathing technique, posture, and other areas. I don’t think many of our students use these DVDs, however. In the future I will make a bigger push to check them out, even if that means doing it with the students during their weekly lessons.

I have a number of internet resources set up for our students and parents. We have a website that contains all the necessary information for scheduling and reminders, as well as a leaderboard for our point system for awards, sample recordings of the pieces we’re working on, and other resources such as fingering charts, warm up exercises, and scale sheets. We also have a rehearsal blog where I post a summary of each of our weekly rehearsals, including the “Video of the Week” that I show in rehearsal. It’s an easy way for students to see what they’ve missed if they weren’t at rehearsal or find the video if it’s something they want to watch again or share with others. I’m sure there are other great videos on YouTube or other sites that would be great modeling videos for my students and excellent additions to our website. That is something I need to explore more for the future. I also started a “listening guide” or list of recordings for each instrument that I need to finish. As a young trumpet player, the recordings I had of Wynton Marsalis were a huge part of who I became, and what I sounded like, as a trumpet player. That was the sound I worked toward, the model I followed, as I worked on my craft (and still continue to today!).

Audacity has proven to be an incredible tool for me as a band director. I use it in rehearsal to record the band playing in the early stages of our pieces so we can listen to it and make a list of things we need to improve. It’s also great for visually showing the dynamics (or lack thereof) in our pieces. I can tell them that they’re not playing with dynamics, but when they see the waveform remains unchanged when they’re supposed to be seeing and hearing things change, it brings the point home stronger. This year I also recorded all of my students in the first week or two of working on their solos for our solo and ensemble festival. I was able to visually show some students the spaces that appeared between their notes and talk about how those notes need to connect better. I also recorded their “final draft” and then uploaded both recordings to their digital portfolios. With some students, I went back and listened to the original recording to talk about how much things had changed over two months of work. In the future, I’d like to create a comparison sheet that each student would fill out after listening to both recordings.

There are so many great tools out there for private and group practice. If you have any favorites, please share them with me!

Creating Original Music (and Dance?)

Reflections for Week 3... The readings and videos for this week got me fired up to find new ways to involve composition in my band program! The uniqueness of my teaching situation often makes projects and assignments difficult due to time constraints. I only have a rehearsal with my band once each week, so we’ve got a long list of things to accomplish at each rehearsal and I often feel that it will be difficult to be ready for our performances if we take time to do things other than working on our pieces. The other aspect of my program is a 20 minute private lesson for each student every week. That allows me to do some things with students one-on-one, which is great, but I often feel pressured to make sure we get through what they practiced at home that week so they aren’t “stuck” with the same assignment for another week. Neither side of the program allows for time in a computer lab where we can all work on projects at the same time. In the past I’ve included some small arranging and composition exercises. Each fall I would have my beginning band write a piece that would be performed at our first concert. It was always a short 8 measure piece that only used the first five notes, but we composed it together. I projected a blank Finale document on the screen and we voted on pitches and rhythms, usually only half and whole notes for that first concert. I could play it back for them immediately, and often times they would hear things they didn’t like and we would fix them. Once in awhile I had to guide them to the correct note at the end, but most of the time they could figure out what sounded right and what didn’t. I would take title suggestions and they would vote on that as well. This way, each group of beginners had a piece they could call their own. In the spring, we wrote a series of variations together on that original theme and performed it with those added variations at our final concert. I also gave those same students a copy of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb, already transposed for them, with enough blank measures to write a variation to it. I would then pick a few of the more original ones and put that together as a theme and variations that featured some of our individual young composers. Everyone played all of it in unison, so there wasn’t a lot of depth to what we did, but it gave the students an opportunity to exercise their own creativity, within certain parameters to give them a better chance for success. Four years ago I moved to a different area and here I have a coworker who runs the beginner band. I still teach all levels of students from grades five through eight, so I do still have the younger ones for individual lessons. There are some neat exercises in our method book, Tradition of Excellence, but I would like to do more. There are so many neat apps out there, some of which I already have on my iPad, but I just haven’t taken the time to explore them enough to see what we could do with them. Just searching a bit today I found I have Loopseque, Looptastic, and Beatwave, all of which look like they have some great possibilities. Maybe I could take one lesson each quarter or semester to have each student use one of these apps to create something original. During my work with Soundation this week, I was reminded of an app called QDancer, which is included with the Quaver Music Online Curriculum and is available as a standalone app. With QDancer, you are able to create your own dance routine to different pre-recorded music tracks. You can set up a ballet routine or a hip-hop routine. There are over 50 stationary and travelling moves to choose from, and you compile the dance by dragging and dropping the actions onto a timeline. There are different backgrounds to choose from and lighting commands you can set up to enhance the performance. When you’re finished, you can watch the routine and save it to share with others. The video below shows QDancer in action.

There are a lot of great possibilities in the area of composition and I hope to explore those more in an effort to include more of this important aspect of musicianship with my students. If you have any favorite activities, projects, or apps you use, please let me know!