Tech Tempo

If a surgeon from the 1800s walked into an operating room today where arthroscopic surgery was being performed, could that surgeon step in and perform the surgery? No way. The surgeon would not even understand what the procedure was, would not understand what the instruments were, and would be totally lost about what was going on.

But if a teacher from the 1800s walked into a classroom today, could he or she substitute as a teacher? If so, why would that be possible?

-from “If We Didn’t Have the Schools We Have Today, Would We Create the Schools We Have Today?” by Thomas G. Carroll

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Andre Gide

As seen on Plurk by Kevin H

This year I tried something new during my last few days of music classes.  I had each grade level review the most exciting things we had done in music that year.  Then each section of a class got to look at the list, vote on the 2 most exciting and write a paragraph as a class describing the event or project.  I managed to get the whole project done in one class period of 25 minutes. 

We wrote our ideas on the Smartboard and edited as a class.  I could tell the 3rd graders have been working on writing a good paragraph in language class.  They made sure they had things like topic sentences!  The second and first graders just basically went with whatever order the sentences came out of their mouths.  I did go back and so some basic editing to make things a little more understandable after class was over but for the most part all I did was cut from Word and paste into Wordpress. 

I was really amazed at how willing the kids were to recall very specific things about our learning this year for this short project. You’ll see that especially in the 2nd and 3rd grade posts. The 2nd graders had a very good recollection of specific instruments and their families, which was a main focus of our classes this year.  The 3rd graders even went so far as to try and remember all the names of the songs from their Christmas Musical this year!

The hurdle to doing this as a class is that inevitably there are a few kids who just try to “zone out” and not participate actively in the discussion and writing.  I think that my last class of 3rd graders may have provided me with a way to avoid that however. 

I’ve started reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms to prepare for a class I’m going to team teach in June.  There’s some really interesting stuff in here!

My students knew they would not be kept totally safe from the ne’erdo-wells of the world, but they also knew they had a choice as to how they responded when faced with such a situation. (page 12)

The longer I work with technology in my classroom the more I see the real good stuff lies in the area of collaboration.  You can keep the collaboration inside the walls of your school but kids can do that kind of collaborating with out the aid of a computer or an internet connection.  But to share your ideas and work outside the walls of your local school is where the big connections begin to occur.  How do people from outside your local area respond to your ideas?  Can you communicate them clearly?   In order to find these things out the school community (teachers, parents, students, etc) need to be willing to put our student work out where the world can see them.  This means that there is a possibility of “ne-erdo-well” having access to your works.  What could go wrong?  LOTS!  But the school community needs to be willing to educate our students, teachers, and families how to cope with this possibility.  This is why it is imperative that teachers first try out these various Web 2.0 applications on their own BEFORE jumping head-first into bringing students into the mix. 

Questions:

• If some one you don’t know leaves an inappropriate comment on your blog do you know what to do?  How do you get rid of it quickly?  How do you keep it from showing up in the first place? 
• What if you don’t have full control of the space where the comment is posted?  Who do you tell?
• Where do you go to change how your name is displayed so that your last name isn’t posted?
• What if someone disagrees with something you’ve posted?  How do you respond to that?  Should you respond at all?

These are all things the teacher needs to be ready to address.  These same kinds of problems exist in the real world and we’ve educated our students about how to cope with them.  Before we go on field trips we tell students not to talk to strangers.  We tell them to stay together with a buddy.  We tell them to find a teacher and tell them when someone is hurt.  We remind them that their behavior outside of our school’s walls will reflect back onto our school and community.  We’ve made a plan.  Everyone knows what do to and we can go safely on our trip.  This same process needs to happen before we leave the virtual walls of our schools.  If everyone doesn’t know what to do then people get hurt.  But we don’t let the fear of negative interactions keeps us prisoner inside the brick walls of our buildings.  We can’t let the small possibility that something small may go awry keep us from letting our students experience these wonderful learning opportunities!

“If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.” - Jack Dixon

From Scottley on Plurk

I’ve always been a teacher that tries to whittle big projects down into smaller more manageable chunks for my students.  This helps them to achieve things they never even imagined was possible. Often students find large tasks overwhelming.  So breaking the project down into mini assignments always helps. 

I did this when it came time for my Middle School Chorus kids to learn solos.  I required each student to learn a solo during the Contest season.  The student could decide if they wanted to perform it for a judge at contest or not but EVERYONE learned a solo to sing for a grade in front of me.  When I started this policy early in my career it was because I had group of chorus students who were unduly afraid of singing for a judge.  Even the students who had no problems with pitch-matching or shyness were not willing to take a song to contest. So I thought if I could encourage everyone to try, then maybe a few of them would change their mind at the end of the project and sing their piece for a judge. 

So we began…… Each student was assigned at piece to sing.  Yes, assigned!  Why?  You see, given the choice to choose their own song the students will most likely request songs they are listening to on the radio.  There are some problems inherent in this.

1. Many of the songs students listen to on the radio do not have appropriate lyrics to sing at contest. 
2. The manner their favorite artist sings is often completely inappropriate for a contest setting.  Judges at contest are looking for things like proper singers diction and focused tone.  Most popular singers do not worry about either of these. 
3. Singing only popular music at contest requires the school district to buy new music every year which gets expensive.  
4. Popular songs often sound completely different with an acoustic piano accompaniment .  There won’t be a bass guitar and drum set backing the student up at contest.
5. Often the student does not take into account the pitch range of the song which can mean that some of the notes are just not singable for some students.  
6. The student already knows the tune!  Where’s the challenge in that?

If the educator guides the whole process beginning with the choice of music there are more learning opportunities for the student.  When I look at pieces for each student I’m considering so many things that the average student doesn’t even perceive.

1. What’s the range of the song?  If it’s for a young man – is there voice changed or unchanged?  If his voice is changed does he need to further develop his low or high range?  Or maybe the student needs to work out a smooth transition between head and chest voice.
2. How long are the phrases?  The first year contest kids usually need something with 4 to 6 measure phrases so we can begin to really work out what it means to take a good deep breath for producing a consistently pleasing tone.  The older kids who’ve been to contest before might be ready to tackle some 8 or 10 measure phrases.
3. Does the piano accompaniment mirror the vocal line?  Stronger singers can deal with a song that has a completely independent vocal line.  Less experienced singers will find comfort in hearing their pitches in the piano part.
4. What’s the dynamic structure of the song?  Singing soft for extended periods is not the best idea for an inexperienced singer as they often don’t understand that soft singing requires more air support not less.
5. What’s the tempo of the piece?  If a student is new to contest and is having trouble sustaining pitch correctly perhaps a more up-tempo piece with some crisp consonants is called for so he or she can have a successful contest experience.
6. What’s the language?  That’s right, my middle school students sing in foreign languages!  Sometimes singing in an unfamiliar language is just the challenge an advanced student needs.  Sometimes having a student sing in another language is the method I use to correct their diction.  Since they don’t have any Italian words in their ear they sing them the way I tell them to so they don’t have  any bad habits to unlearn. 
7. What’s the story of the song?  Some kids really identify with the aesthetics of music.  Those students need a song that will help them express something that they never felt comfortable expressing before.  Or perhaps the student needs a song where they can step outside of themselves and pretend to be someone else for a few minutes.

Now I know what my first students thought at first.  “Geez!  Mrs. Muench is such a control freak and she won’t let me choose any good music!”   I often told them that I didn’t need to teach them the music on the radio because they already knew that.  My job is to teach them things they don’t know.  And after that first year of multiple students successes the students were more willing to work with me on what I thought would be best for their particular voice.  Each contest season I also tried to express to them why I choose a particular song for them.  This helped the student to assess their own progress.  And it gave them a window into what sorts of things they could look for in a solo piece.  After a couple of years of going through the process I did give the students the ability to choose their solos in tandem with me by 8th grade if they wanted to. 

It seems so unfair to me to throw a 11 year old student into the wide unfamiliar ocean of Contest Solo Singing!  Please, at least, give them the life raft of your knowledge as a teacher – Help them to choose an appropriate song!!!

You’d think after 12 years of teaching I would remember how looooooong it takes to do things on the network with my 1st graders.  But sometimes I forget.  You see, my kids are really good at finding their favorite links on my Delicious page or at using Groovy Shapes on the SmartBoard.  So when we were working on saving our own copy of a file to the networked music folder I thought 5 minutes of the 20 minute class ought to be plenty of time to get everyone’s file saved.  But I forgot that we’ve NEVER done this before. 

So what ended up happening was that I spent 5 minutes being really stressed out that my first 2 classes couldn’t seem to get the files that they had just created saved into the correct location.  But I’m happy to report that I finally wised up a bit by the third group of first graders! 

With this group before we did any work we saved the file with the student’s name.  First we did it together as a class with me working off the Smartboard.  Then I brought up the folder where everyone’s file should have been.   Any students whose names where in the folder could then proceed to work on their file or they could help their neighbor save into the correct folder.  The key is that no one was allowed to do any work until their name appeared in the folder I had open on the board.  By the end of the class everyone had a file created and that meant that when there was 2 minutes until they had to leave I could just say, “Click the disk to save” because we had already aimed the file into the right folder.  This was much easier and less stressful! 

By the way – my first graders have no idea what a disk is because they’ve never seen disk!  Maybe it’s time to rethink the icon we use to indicate “save”.

Here’s the good news - This digital camera was cheap!  It cost me only $25 on clearence at Radio Shack.  The neck strap has a break away piece to keep the camera from choking kids.  It does take pictures as you can see above but that’s about all I can find to say that’s nice.

Here’s the bad news -

1. Horrible picture quality…..See above.  Very blurry and these were the best ones I could capture.
2. Batteries - First of all it takes FOUR AAA!!!!  Poorly made battery compartment that is hard to get to because of the angle of the screws.  And what’s with the screw on battery compartment on kid’s stuff?  What a pain!  Batteries wouldn’t even make contact to power up the camera.  My husband had to do some “surgery” on the camera so it would function.
3. Long wait time between button press and picture being captured during which you must remain completely still.  Seriously, I had to really concentrate to hold still long enough to get even a mediocre picture.  Kids?  Forget it!
4. Spring loaded door over the USB input on the camera gets in the way of the USB cord being completely pushed into the hole, which means your computer won’t recognize that it’s plugged in.

My recommendation:  If you want a durable kid type digital camera get something else.

Happy Music In Our Schools Month!

Do you remember how your elementary music classes looked? When I think back to my own elementary music classes we did A LOT of singing and some learning of rhythms but mostly we did a lot of singing. This type of elementary music class was basically a training ground for the band and chorus. So if you weren’t interested in playing an instrument or singing then music could have been a pretty uninteresting class. Luckily for me I was interested in singing but some of my friends were not. The music classes I took in elementary were very narrow in focus but that is no longer the case for today’s music students.

What are young musicians in Iroquois West doing right now? At the elementary buildings there are many exciting projects going on. The first graders have been really busy exploring rhythms. They have been composing their own songs using quarter and eighth notes. The second graders have been investigating the instruments of the orchestra. To that end, they are completing movies of interviews with each instrument. The kindergarten classes are busy preparing original musical plays to the story of the 3 Billy Goats Gruff. Third grade just won an award for their participation on a project with a group of 5^th graders in Chicago! The 3^rd graders are also busy choreographing a square dance to the popular country song “Bob that Head” by Rascal Flatts.

Now an elementary music class is more about exposing students to all the different facets of music. We don’t just sing anymore. We play drums and boomwhackers. We use the computer to compose. We dance and we make movies. But the most important change in elementary music education is that now we try to incorporate ways to let the student be creative with the information they are learning. We don’t just learn how to square dance. We write our own dance! We don’t just play rhythms. We compose short pieces using what we know! We don’t just learn about the instruments. We use our knowledge to make a movie! By giving the students an opportunity to superimpose their own ideas on to the subject, we give the student a chance to become drawn into the subject itself.

Music is factual, true. Kids can know what family an instrument belongs to and why. Or they can know that E is on the bottom line of the treble staff. However generally speaking, facts aren’t what draw a person into a subject matter. Personal interaction with the subject is what makes learning a worthwhile endeavor. Sure, that’s a violin and it’s in the string family but do you LIKE violins? Does the sound of one calm you down or annoy you? Can violins only play classical music? Could you play a violin? Would you even want to? The process of answering questions like these is how our students begin to have a more complete understanding of music. Those personal questions of how the music affects you can be addressed in this more project based approach (writing musicals and short compositions) to teaching music.

This change in way that music is presented to our elementary students helps the students to realize that even if you don’t ever want to play in the band or sing in the chorus that music still has something to offer them in every day life. Do I hope that by exposing students to all the different facets of music that they will want to learn how to sing or play an instrument? You bet! My hope is that music class will inspire many students to find a way to their own individual way to be musical. Band and chorus are great musical outlets.

And remember you don’t have to sound great right away to try making music. You just have to want to try! The music teachers in our schools are trained to help you become a better musician. We can teach you what you need to know. You just need to provide the desire and the time to put into practice what we will teach you.

What it comes down to is this: Music is part of who we are as humans – everyone has music in them! I am so proud to be a part of a school district where each student has an opportunity to explore this musical part of being human. As a community of learners’ only good things will blossom from the care to we give to the music programs at IW. Thank you being willing to support the growth of the whole student in our district!

Sincerely,

Brenda D Muench

Iroquois West k-3 Music Educator

Over the weekend I tried really, really hard to come up with some new ideas that I had been exposed to while at the ICE conference.  I remember coming back last year (which was also my first year of attendance) thinking, “Holy Cow!!! There’s so many cool things I didn’t even know about that are FREE!  Is there any way I can work all this into my teaching?”

This year I can’t think of any one new idea that really hit me as earth shattering.  Why is that I wonder?  Well first of all I’ve really started to work diligently to create a PLN using tools like this blog and Plurk.  By connecting myself this way I essentially get all those new and fantastic ideas as they become available in real time.  I don’t really need to go to a conference each year to find out those new ideas and products.  I already know about Wordles and Podcasting and Voicethreads.   I did occasionally find a new way of using these tools but I did not come back home feeling overwhelmed with new ideas.

This leads me to wonder further then if I can do all this learning online is going to a conference like ICE really all that important?  The answer for me is a resounding YES!  This was only the second year I have attended ICE and because of my PLN I traveled 2 hours north knowing that people from all over the US were looking forward to meeting me at the conference.  I felt like someone who had been coming to this conference for years - all due to my contributions in my PLN during the year.  It was a fantastic feeling.

I remember going to IMEA music conference my first year of teaching and feeling a little depressed that perhaps I would get there and I wouldn’t have anyone to eat supper with at night, no one to talk to after the conference sessions were over.  And yep, that is exactly what happened.  I didn’t have any connections at that conference yet.  It took me about 7 years of going before I really felt like I had comrades there.  So it is even more amazing to me then that in only my 2nd year of ICE attendance I have “peeps”.  Wouldn’t it be the most fantastic thing if this same experience could be replicated for other new attendees each year?  This year I was looking forward to hearing exactly how Jen’s move was going, how Kymberli’s kid was feeling, and how Jennifer enjoyed her trip to her favorite state of IL.  I was excited to see them in person for the first time to put a 3D face with their 2D avatar in my brain.  I was looking forward to hearing more about their struggles with tech and in life in general.

These connections are what the conference is becoming about for me.  I know that these people love kids and can be trusted to answer my questions with out judgement.  I know that no matter what topic I need to address one or more of them will have experience with it.  I know those strange things like hosting my own blog or starting up Google Apps for Education that scare me just a little can be best addressed at a face to face meeting during a conference.  So I find myself coming to these events with a list of things that I want to get one on one help with.  I also find these face to face meetings are a great place to discuss those high and lofty ideas.   At a face to face meeting I get to hear the vocal inflections and see the facial expressions that let me know where the areas which each of my PLN colleges are truly invested.   And amazingly in discussing these big ideas I can begin to have a better understanding of where I am truly invested.

During this conference I came to a firm realization that I am concerned that no one appears to be teaching our students how to produce a POSITIVE digital foot print.  I realized this in the middle of a conversation with Kevin H. Where are the teachers in my area that are showing students how to create and post things that they can be proud of later on?  Where is the person who is saying not just, “Don’t put pictures of yourself drinking on your MySpace page!”  but also “Have you thought about how your MySpace page could be something that is more than clean?  It COULD be a huge bulletin board of what makes you the coolest thing since sliced bread!”  Where is that teacher?  Why aren’t there more of them?  THIS is the kind of teachers our students need to have to succeed in a digital world, our world, today, now!  Scare tactics don’t work.  Most kids (and adults) don’t really ever think that a silly thing like a picture of you could have horrible repercussions.  We need to be giving students alternative information to post, because they are going to post something.  They need guidance and ideas and a positive role model who is already using their digital footprint responsibly.

I am ready to be that teacher and ICE has reminded me of this.