Summative Post

As I wrap up my ICT class, here are a few final thoughts on technology and education.

Disappointed by Xtranormal

I tried making a movie today with Xtranormal and was really disappointed with it. I thought it would be a great education tool as it states that if you can type, you can make movies. This seemed like it could be an awesome classroom tool because the students would be able to get a great result out of something that did not require alot of outside prep work. But unfortunately I did not even get to the end result before I was disappointed.
To give the site a chance I will say that I only created a free account. It may work better with an account that is paid for, but as a first time user I did not want to put money down on something that I couldn't try out first.
When you sign up with the free account it gives you 500 points to begin with. But to pick the most basic background is over 100 points, and picking the most basic character is over 100 points. So if you have picked to do two characters you are already over 300 points. At this point I was already super disappointed in the animation and gave up for the night.
When I tried to get back into it today I could not remember my password (or frankly what email address I had used to create it). I tried looking through my different email accounts, but website did not send me any sort of confirmation of what I had used. So I ended up feeling lost and really did not want to try it again.
So in terms of using digital story telling, I have given up on Xtranormal and will continue using animoto for now, at least until I find another story telling sight that I like.

Animoto

Fun little video that I made today on Animoto. This could be used for alot of great applications in the classroom. A great interactive way for students to create stories from their own lives. Take a look!

dissecting pig heart

Oh, Powerpoint

I really enjoy powerpoint presentations. Througout highschool I used them often, and I think I am pretty savy with using it. embedding videos, creating really interesting layouts, inserting voice overlays; the program allows for a lot of different and interesting creations to be developed from it. Yet people still make so many boring, and ugly presentations.
A few of the common mistakes that happen during powerpoints are:
way too many transitions
bad text: font, color, and size
animations that often look immature
bad sound effects (good only if you are actually trying to be funny)
too much text on the slide
no pictures or too many pictures
.....so much more than can't be listed at this time.
I really love the features that powerpoint can offer, but people really need to remember that the powerpoint is just an aid to their presentation, not the other way around. Ok, now that I have had my rant, how do I teach students to use powerpoint properly? Presentations are scary for students, and having an aid like powerpoint can really help them to feel more confident in their presentations. Of course they will run into the giltches at first that I just mentionned, that is part of the learning process. How do you get students past the point of the boring ugly powerpoint presentation? How do you get students to use the powerpoint as a creative outlet during learning and build a strong presentation at the same time? A few thoughts to ponder....

Give kids a chance!

I Just watched a tedtalks video by Sir Ken Robinson, and I have got to say that he deserves such a prestigious title for he is a smart man, and not just university prof smart either.

Interestingly enough the largest statement that stuck with me from his entire speech was this :

"Shakespeare was in someone's English class".

Robinson had said this as a bit of a joke, and kept on moving, but it really remained with me. Every student that walks into our classroom has the potential to become the next Shakespeare, Einstein, or god forbid, Justin Beiber. We do not know what our students will become.... it's as simple as that. We have NO IDEA what our students will become.

Yet we are all still preparing our lessons to teach in the same way as we have learned. Math and English before social studies, social studies before music, music before drama. We teacher our students that if you excel in drama but not in math, that you are stupid. This is how our education system works. If what you excel in will not get you a stable "normal person" job than it is not of worth. And because it is not of worth, you are not of worth. Bit of a harsh reality to face from the teaching and growing that we like to imagine ourselves doing as teachers.

So how to change it? That is the bigger question. I want to believe that because I am going to teach music that I have already taken a big step in supporting the musical students in having confidence in their abilities and in themselves. But unfortunately I am also aware that when they sit in math class and cannot do their multiplication tables it is going to emphasised to them that they are not as good as the rest of the class, even though they may be the only one getting a good tone out of a recorder (or the best tone that can be produced out of a recorder anyway).

I am really feeling hopeless as I am posting this because I really do not know how I can personally change this fact. It really needs to be a whole system revolution. To allow students to embrace themselves for who they are and what they are good at is a huge task, and it will be a huge task also to change our system to allow them to do so. I hope that we can be inspired as a whole to embrace our students, to change our system, and to not squander the potential that our students hold.

Dear Santa...

Ok so I need to have a bit of a chat with the jolly old fella and his white beard and awesome magical bag because I totally think he has an ipad for me stashed into the bag of his somewhere. This is because recently I have fallen in love with the one that I have been using from school. Of course checking facebook, pinterest, and every other waste of time I can find on there are so easily accessible, but there is so much more to it than that. I have been taking it with me everywhere and using it for everything!

Ipads are seriously a great education too! Not only for students, but also for the teacher. I seriously do not know how I am going to be able to write a lesson plan again without one. They allow me to write my rehearsal plan anywhere, can have it right on the stand with my score, and make edits at any point before my rehearsal, even if it is one minute before. They are also great in rehearsal because all gadgets (metronome, tuner, keyboard if necessary) are all in device that is attached with the lesson plan.

As an student I have been using it a lot also. I can edit documents, highlight papers, and do any research I need from one devise. So seriously, anyone talking to Santa Claus any time soon please tell him that he needs to give presents to adults too (and that I would really like an ipad), thanks!

Smartboard

I have fallen in love with the smartboard. Recently we looked at using the smartboard in class and I did not realize all the different things that can be done with it. My peers brought in a lot of different ideas, ranging from using the actual score, circle of fifths, and even simple notation learning. These were all really awesome and I learned many different things that the smartboard does.

I had always thought that the smartboard was not really something that would be used as much in the music classroom but after the class last week my opinion on that has totally changed. There is so much that can be done with the smartboard if you are aware of what it can do. It is great to help students visualize the aural concepts of music and I am really excited to get to use it more!

John Jacobson

 I attended a session by John Jacobson last week that got me thinking. You may also know him as the double dream hands guy.  At the conference he present the music educators there with a lot of different music/ musicals that he has written and dance moves to go with alot of it. He has produced alot of great music for teachers to use with their students and is really passionate about what he does.
He also provides online instruction for how to do alot of the dance moves that go along with his music. You can youtube him and he provides the dance instructions for you. He even suggested that you could put the video on for your students to help them how to learn the dance moves. I really was not sure about this.
Though the videos may be good for the teacher to learn the moves, I do not know if showing it to students is the best plan. This would be a great way to use technology in the music classroom, but I really do not think that students would be motivated by Jacobson's videos. He is really excited about what he does, but I think that some students would just find him to be more ridiculous that inspiring. Take a look and see what you think!

Great Blog

So, I have been spending some more time on pinterest (well ok maybe more than a little) and found a music educators blog that I really like. The blogger's name is Aileen Miracle (super cool name) and her blog is great. She is a Kodaly teacher and it looks like she is really good at what she does.  There are lessons plans, ideas for writing music for the classroom, and a link to her website that has a bunch of smartboard activities. The website it only in its beginning stages but what is there is awesome. Take a look at both!

http://aileenmusic.wordpress.com/
http://kodalycorner.weebly.com/smart-board.html

Working against bullying

Bullying was something that was brought up briefly in one of my other classes this week and it got me thinking about it in terms of ICT. How do we as teachers deal with problems in our classrooms that are being dealt with by our students?

Students often do not have the skills to deal with their confrontations in the best way and this often leads to bullying (in all mediums that are available to them).So through my personal contemplation, I came to a conclusion that really emphasized to me that we need to encourage our students to act responsibly. Bullying is a huge issue that has affected most people who have gone through the school system, yet it is a cycle that is still happening, even with anti-bullying classes.

So I think it’s time to take a different approach on top of our regular anti-bullying techniques. First off we need to work with our students to take accountability for their actions and think about how their actions affect others, and why not use the internet to do so?

My thoughts are to have a weekly poll on the class website where each student answers questions about how they feel about respect within the school that week .The results of the poll could only be seen by the teacher/ administration .We could ask students questions like:

Have you had a confrontation with a peer this week?

(If yes) Was it solved in a positive or negative way?

Do you feel that our class is working together in a positive way?

Is everyone in our class treating each other with respect?

Is everyone in our school treating each other with respect?

(These are just a few of question ideas that I came up with, please share if you have others or modifications that you would like to make to mine)

On top of asking the questions each week, I would also like an easily accessible way for students to notify their teacher about bullying or unrespectful situations that are going on, either experiencing personally or observed. This may just go to the teacher’s email, but it would provide the different forum that students may need in approaching the teacher with problems.

This I think would give us a really quick and easy way to assess situations going on in our schools and work with our students to stop bullying one another.

Do you think this would work? I am curious to hear what others have to think about this as a prevention method!

website confusion

School websites are a concept that I am really struggling to correlatewith the elementary music classroom.  Throughout my education I have had teachers who have had both really good and really bad classroom websites. Sometimes they were bad because there was nothing useful on them, other times they were bad because there was too much on them. But good or bad, I have always felt that a teacher's website was something that was done last minute as something that they had to do, not because they really wanted to.
While trying to make a website in class I have been really contemplating what to put on this website. I focus on elementary music education and do not want to create a website that has no use to my students, but I cant decide what would be useful. Even remembering what my band teachers would do in highschool does not give me much guidance. Elementary music is a very participatory subject that varies a great deal from other subjects taught at this level, and I struggle to find a way to bring the classroom environment into a website.
So I am turning to the great world wide web (and any of my classmates that read this), what do you think would be effective to put on a elementary music classroom website?

Just for a Laugh

This made me laugh when I ran across it today (link is at the bottom if you want to see more).


 http://www.tonedeafcomics.com/things-that-tick-off-band-directors-2/

Overcoming the Feared Technology Monster

Giving up control for most of us is a crazy concept. We like to think that we control what our students learn, how they learn it, and how they act while doing so. But the reality is that we don't.

I make this statement because I think that we try to control students way too often in their use of technology. There is an overwhelming belief that if we give them restricted access to the use of technologies in the classroom then that is the best way for them to learn. I disagree.

I truly feel that we should allow students to have open access to all technologies in the classroom. By this I mean no limitations on internet usage, access to social networks within the school setting, and yes even CELLPHONES ALLOWED IN CLASS! There are so many advantages that these technologies offer us in the classroom that if we do not open up access I feel that we are doing our students an injustice.

Many teachers would agree that there are a lot of advantages to using these technologies, they do not agree with providing free access to students because teachers are concerned about students using technology in inappropriate, un-educational ways. I can understand these concerns but I have a few rebuttals to this idea:

1. If we do not give students the chance to make decisions for themselves, they will never develop the skills. Like it or not, technology is going to be a part of our students lives for the rest of their lives. If they learn early on to make decisions on their own with technology they will be more likely to make positive decisions in life with technology also.

2. A student being off task with a technology is not any different than a student being off task without it. We already have students become off task in classrooms everyday without technologies. If they are doodling on the page, day dreaming, passing notes to the cute guy across the room, or gossiping with their friend beside them our students are already being sidetracked. We do not ban our students from having pens in class if they doodle so why do we ban students from having phones in class when they text? We already have methods for dealing with "regular" distractions and I feel like that they could be used effectively with technologies also.

3. If students remain off task because of technology they will see it reflected in the product of their work. This provides us with an opportunity to help our student learn about being responsible for his or her actions. Banning his or her use of technology does not teach the student to be accountable for his or her actions

4. By creating restrictions for technologies, we are challenging our students to try and break our rules. If we give our students open access while teaching them to be responsible about using technology I feel that we would be much more effective.  Students would be able to spend more time using technology responsibly because they are not preoccupied with breaking our technology rules.

We need to get over our big fears of technology and realize that no matter what medium we provide students to learn in, there will be risks. Instead of trying to control we need to learn to guide. By doing so we provide our students with more resources, more chances to learn, and more chances to act responsibly.

One more reason to Love Pinterest!

Today in class we were talking about using different sites to organize our organization. Naturally pinterest came up, and I have to admit that though I do not pin a immense amount, I am extremely addicted to pinterest. I have saw pins previously about lessons in math, ELA, science, etc. but for some reason I never thought to look for anything music education relation... Crazy right?

So tonight I just did a simple search of "music classroom" to see what it would come up with. Ironically enough, the first pin that I looked at totally relates to ICT in the music classroom.  The first phrase of this teacher's about me is "I'm a passionately SMART music teacher who loves to create and teach using technology". What could be more perfect than to have this be my lead into for an ICT (music specific) course!

I have just skimmed the surface of this blog so far and I am absolutely loving it. Hope you guys enjoy Cherie Herring even half as much as I do!

http://cphmusic.blogspot.ca/search?updated-max=2012-02-26T11:27:00-05:00

P.S. Let me know if the link doesnt work!

Intro thoughts ICT

I feel like technology in the music classroom is a complicated concept to incorporate. Though there is alot of technology out there that has alot of potential for our students, I feel that incorporating it into our pre-existing music education system is difficult. With much of our focus beng on producing concerts and productions, is there time in the school year to incorporate technology in the classroom?

I do really hope that our music education system does allow us time to use technologies in the classroom. Or possibly more important is that we make time for technology if we deem it to be important. The potential learning that our students have with technologies is great, and even though incorporating them may be burdensome for ourselves, I think it is extremely important to provide our students this opportunity. I hope that through learning about ICT in education I will find ways to improve my students learning with technologies.