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?