The link for the presentation is here

Thanks for stopping by my blog! If you are looking for the link list for my IMEA presentation you can find it here.

Here’s the IMEA 2010 handout too

My slides can be found at Slideshare:

I have a piano student who is a Freshman in high school this year. She’s been playing piano for at least 5 years now. Rebekah has a real love of music. She’s developing an ear for classical and jazz but I worried that perhaps she was becoming too attached to the written notes. I needed to push her use her ear as well as her eye. So we began working on simple hymns for church. I showed her how to read the guitar chords in the music and taught her some basic patterns to create simple accompaniments to the melody line. This was becoming a great project to review the grand cadence, transposing and key signatures! So we decide to take 3 songs and make an arrangement to play for church. It went really well! So we decided to do another one. But this time I felt Rebekah was struggling with the process of blending the pieces together. So I post Rebekah’s initial work on her medley on Youtube and ask for help:

I threw the video link out on Twitter and wonder of wonders the fabulous Mark Brymer contacts me and says he’d like to Skype with Rebekah! Mark and I tweet back and forth to set up the time and date. When the big day arrived Rebekah and I were so excited!

Our Skype with Mark Brymer Begins:

The 2nd part of our Skype conversation with Mark:

Mark did such a great job of helping to push us over our mental block! I had covered the circle of 5ths with Rebekah when we learned the scales but I had failed to label it as the “Circle of 5ths” for her. And I hadn’t thought to use this concept with her for composing. I already know that our next medley won’t be one where all 3 pieces are in the same key that way she can make some practical use of this new (to her) concept.

Rebekah’s Revised Version:

Even 5 years ago I didn’t have the knowledge to pull something like this together. But now because of things like Skype, Twitter, and my wonderful PLN, students like Rebekah will be blessed with authentic learning experiences! Wow! Amazing!

Having 2nd graders run up to you at the end of a class and BEG you to let them keep listening to recordings of the orchestra instruments instead of going to their next class!

I have recently received a most fabulous gift. An iPod Touch!! Today I’m going to continue this series with some of the apps have made it into permanent rotation on my device after a few months of using it. Today’s areas of focus are………

Sometimes I Hate Math

Sale Price – With this app I can figure out what’s the price of an item that was 40% off and then another 50% off the first sale price. LOVELY!

CheckPlease Lite – I can split the check 4 ways and figure out tip. Then have the amount go straight into Pocket Money (my checkbook program). I have only used this a few times but I really like the concept.

Fun Stuff

Geosphere (paid) - I am a geocacher. I was looking for an app that would let me carry all my cache information with me. Also I wanted to log my caches and upload them when I got back to an area with wifi. Geosphere lets me to both. Plus the app just looks really slick.

Flashlight – I have actually used this one! It’s literally just a white screen. Works great!

Splat! – Swatting flies by rocking the iTouch forward. Even my 5 year old niece likes this one.

iDork Lite – Draw lines on the screen to get your stick dude to move to the hole in the paper but be careful of falling pencils or you’ll just be a bloody splat on the page!

SnapWords – Each team gets a turn to get their members to say a set of words before time runs out. After 3 or 4 words you get a difficult word. Difficult words often prompt, “uhhhhhhhhh” and then some creative thinking! This one is great for long car rides with older kids or adults.

WordFlipper – Use the letters to make as many long words as possible before time runs out.  I love this kind of game!

I have recently received a most fabulous gift. An iPod Touch!! Today I’m going to continue this series with some of the apps have made it into permanent rotation on my device after a month of using it. Today’s area of focus is………

Social Networking

Tweet Deck – I used this program already on my laptop to help me get my twitter account into a more manageable beast. I have found so many people that I can learn from on Twitter but the amount of tweets that would appear between each of my log ons was more than I could ever look at and still have a life. Also I was missing important tweets from my music educator buds.  Tweet Deck has fixed that for me.  I have organized the people I follow into groups: teachers, music teachers, local friends, and everyone else.  I read the music teachers column every day and I scan the teachers group daily. If I have time I can scan the rest of my columns or I can just mark them all as seen and go on with my day.

Plurk – Plurk is much like Twitter for me but the conversations are deeper as the community is smaller. The threaded conversations also make it much easier to keep track of who commented on what topic.

Facebook – The Facebook app is paired down from the regular site but everything I need is here.  I can check my mail, see who’s left something on my wall and chat. Plus using this version keeps me from wasting hours on the actual site.

Bump – I’ll be honest about this one. I haven’t actually used it yet. But the idea intrigues me.  So I’ve got it set up and ready to go. I’ll let you know cool it is once I get to a tech conference where more people are likely to have it on their iPhone.

Textfree Lite – This is my answer to all my friends who like to text me. I know it’s hard to believe that a techie girl like me wouldn’t have a text plan but it’s something I’ve never really had much use for in life. I’m finding however that all my buds who have teenage kids are really attached to texting and sometimes they text me even though I don’t have any text plan on my phone. So I thought this app might fix my problem.  There are some limitations though. I can only send 15 texts each day but I can receive an unlimited number of texts. But here’s the real kicker: People who want to text me can only reply to my texts for there to be no charge to my phone account. That’s a pain. I’ve considered buying the paid version but so far haven’t taken the leap.

Bluegrass 09

Every year there’s something that just floors me and is SOOOOO huge that I just want to take a nap and hope it goes away. During my first few years of teaching it was getting an elementary Christmas Concert together. Then a few years later it was pulling the high school musical together. Then a few years after that it was starting up my classroom website.  This year it’s getting our district technology plan together.  All of these things are so overwhelmingly large!!!! There are so many different directions they could go. So many ideas to consider. So many people to organize. It all makes my head spin. 

You see, I’m a detail girl and large projects often have more details than I can wrap my head around. So I pick an area and start to focus. Often in the first year of tackling a project I end up going back and re-doing something I thought I completed early on because I didn’t quite have a strong grasp of all the variables. When I began the  elementary Christmas concert I didn’t realize how much time it would take to get 1st graders to sing a song with 4 verses nicely.  I moved on to the 2nd verse too quickly and had to go back a re-teach the first verse after the 3rd verse. When I did the high school musical I didn’t plan for costumes early enough and had to spend quite a few afternoons (before rehearsal) driving around the countryside looking for dresses from the local theater companies. This year with the tech plan I’m so new that I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong YET but I sure I’ll find something shortly.

I need to learn to accept that I can’t do everything right the first time every time. I find myself thinking, “I’ve been an educator for 14 years now. I should know how to do all this stuff – even if it’s brand new to me.” Just like I remember thinking, “I should know how to plan a Christmas Concert! I’ve been learning this for the last 4 years of college!” during my first year of teaching. Maybe the underlying thought here for me is more along the lines of: “I’m pretty smart, I can figure most things out. Why isn’t this easier!?!”

So this feeling right here, this feeling of frustration, unpreparedness, anger, and confusion, this feeling is one I need to remember. I feel like I’m doing this all by myself and there’s no one to help. Even though there are lots of people I can ask questions, I don’t even know which questions to ask them! I need help but I don’t know what help I need. So I just need to get busy so I can find the questions to ask.  But I’m still really angry that this is the best way to go about this for right now – it’s messy and non-linear and seems like it might possibly be a total waste of my time.

That feeling right there is how my students students feel when I ask them to research a composer or try to find their singing voice.  That’s how my fellow teachers feel when they get a new tool like a Smartboard or a projector. That’s how my administration feels they learn about a new tool like a blog or a wiki.

So folk,s when I say I know how you feel…..I really mean it. I understand that anger and frustration but we have to push through it to get to the other side. I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other in the areas I’m struggling with and I’ll do my best to support you as you do the same.  And when it’s all said and done we’ll both be better educators and learners because of it.

Today I was cruising this fabulous list of active music blogs by Dr. Joseph Pisano and I met a new educator. Well I began subscribing to his blog. He may not even know that I exist. While I was scanning this new to me blog called Music Is Not for Insects I stumbled upon a post including this video by Bobby McFerrin.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

You just gotta love  Bobby McFerrin! I would imagine that most elementary music teachers can relate to this. I do things like this every day! What amazes me most about Bobby is how easily he can multitask musically.