music and technology

We had a chance to tell our colleagues about this course in our elementary faculty meeting yesterday.  What we shared fits nicely into this blog post.  It was a lot of work and was occasionally stressful, but overall it was worth it.  Learning anything new is rarely easy.  Perhaps we’ll have more insight into what it feels like to be the learner rather than the teacher.  There was too much information to take in for the ten week period, but I found most of it will be useful in my teaching life.  I’m just starting to imagine how my music web page will change  now that I know about so many new tools.   Burning question:  What will this “stuff” be called when our grandchildren are adults?  Web 1,000? 

I can see the end in sight!!! I did not think I had any more mental energy left to absorb new ideas, but I liked Ning and Classroom 2.0.  I think they provide a way to combine many ideas from this course.  Here’s what I liked:

•  Web 2.0 learning:  great discussions, smart board ideas, and new ideas for me such as Wetpaint and diigo  (I think diigo might be the answer to my organizational issues with all this new tech stuff.
• Musictechnology blog:  I found this in the web 2.0 site.  This blog shows kids how to do podcasts with step by step instructions.  Simple enough that even teacher could understand.
• Music Educators Looking for Collaboration:   I found a rotoball project that would be great for middle/upper elem. music students.  Schools from around the world participate by having kids create music (garage band style) for the animation.
• A music blog that was set up strictly for kids to write opinions and reactions to music they listened to.
• Voices of the World:  This site sets up a new task each month using Voki, animato and podcasts.  Kids record and make pictures for a specified song and share them.  At this point there are 8 different countries, so there is a huge variety of languages.

I’m trying to brief, but it’s hard to synthesize all the ways I observed people using the social network.  Many of our students are already huge users of social networks and many of the networks have been geared towards them. With two teenagers in my  home, I have already experienced how places like facebook can be both wonderful and harmful.  Not all kids have a clear idea of how to use this public forum appropriately.  That said, I think a network like Ning is awesome because it can allow us,  as teachers to tap in to the fascination with social networks, but in a much more focused way with academic topics.  Hooray!  Best of all, it’s easy.Smiley face egg by marimar 

 FROM QUOTIKI:   Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. Mark Twain  snowflake by Howard J Duncan   I have become increasing overwhelmed by the amount of new information I have been exposed to in this class. (Great class, but it should be split into two parts with a long space between)  Pageflakes, however, seems like the tool that could help create order out of the chaos.Through my pagecast search I found ME Bloggers Best in Musical technology site.  WOW!  If you teach music, check it out.I added the Mother of all podcast feeds, Netflix (although the link did not work well), my personal favorite, Space Invaders game with no educational relevance, universal video search, suite 101.com music education articles and quotiki.  Suite 101 had articles such as fantastic drummer and singing tips.  At first try it seems I would use this in a personal and professional way more than directly with students.  If I had more time with my kids I can imagine lots of ways to add this to music instruction.