Blog Archives
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.
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.
I have recently received a most fabulous gift. An iTouch!! Today I’m going to start 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………
Life Management
Pocket Money Lite – This is the app I settled on to keep track of my checking account. A few months before I got my iTouch I also opened my first debit card. (I know, I know, I’m late to this game. I don’t text either. More on that in another entry) It was so frustrating to me to have to write down in my checkbook register all those withdrawals via my debit card. Why did I have to record something with a pen and paper that was happening digitally? Even more frustrating for me is that my rural bank, which has been very good to me, does not have internet banking. ARG! Add to this that I recently started looking for a replacement for my beloved Microsoft Money and you’ve got one frustrated techie! Enter my iTouch and Pocket Money Lite and I am again one peaceful techie. My techie transactions are now completely techie!
CardStar – I have to be honest about this one. I love the concept but I haven’t yet had a business that could get the barcode to scan off my iTouch. I’m keeping CardStar because even if the barcode doesn’t scan the numbers off the code can still be typed in by the clerk. This means that I still don’t have to carry around all those pesky membership cards and that is HUGE!
WordPress –I can blog from my iTouch!! Need I say more? And this will motivate me to get better at typing with my thumbs. 
Grocery Gadget ($4.99) I loved my grocery list. Just ask the hubs! This app means that I know how much I’m going to spend before I even get to the check out and I can budget more easily. The process to add things to the list is really easy and it’s customizable. Shopping is easy as each item gets moved down to the bottom of the list after I mark it off. I do wish there was a way to mark items that I have coupons for though. Right now I’m making notes on each individual item but I have to go back and erase the notes each week as I clear the list.
CalenGoo ($6.99) I LOOOOOOVE my Google Calendar! Now I finally have access to it when I’m not online and it syncs when I get back to area with wifi. Oh and I can still keep all my other calendars too. I can see mine, Mom’s, Carol’s, and IW’s. All these in its full color coded glory. Have I mentioned I love being color coded? I do!!
Next time: iTouch: Help Me Stay Connected!
the garden comes to you…….for FREE.
This is not tech or music but today’s events demonstrate why sharing is the way we live around here.
Today while I was busily trying to clean out my Google Reader (hey there’s some tech!) my husband called me from the front door, “Brenda you need to come out here!”
“Uh oh!” I said. That just sounded like trouble or bad news. But when I got outside I was greeted by one of our customers who had a the back of his truck wide open and inside was this:
Or here’s the 2nd version:
I only took what we could eat but he would have let me clean out the truck if I wanted. These pics don’t even include the 12 ears of fantastically sweet corn that we’ve gotten in the last 48 hours! The back of this guy’s truck was loaded from wall to wall with fruits and veggies that he grew and couldn’t eat. So he loaded them up and found people to GIVE them to around the community. I love living here!
I’ll admit it. I haven’t taught my elementary kids to sing the National Anthem for many years. Please refrain from calling me un-American.
In my early days as a music teacher I thought I was my civic duty to teach ALL my kids to sing the Anthem. I tried really hard. Surely I thought by the end of 3rd grade everyone should know all the words and be able to sing a lovely rendition of our National Anthem. But after 3 years of hearing my first graders struggle with words like ramparts and twilight and listening to my 3rd graders strain to hit the high notes correctly or, even worse, just switch to a lower key in the middle of the song, I gave up. It was a hard choice to make. I love our Anthem. I have so many great memories of singing it in my High School chorus and singing it solo during many sporting events starting in 6th grade. But our National Anthem is hard – it’s hard to sing because the range is very large and because the words aren’t ones commonly used today. Actually language is a problem I have with teaching many patriotic folk songs to my students. “Amber waves of grain” creates some beautiful imagery but 1st graders just don’t get it!
Now please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying I CAN’T teach my elementary kids to sing our Anthem. I am saying that perhaps that particular song isn’t one that developmentally appropriate for students this age. I DID manage to teach all my k-3 students the whole entire Anthem in those first 2 years of my career. It wasn’t a pretty process and I’m not sure it was the best use of the few educational minutes I’m being given each year. What I’m saying is I won’t teach my k-3 students the Anthem. I’ll discuss with them the proper behavior when it’s sung. I’ll expose them to multiple listenings of different recordings it but I won’t require that they can sing it.
When DO I think students are ready to learn the anthem? For my program the Middle School Chorus was a great time to learn it. Mastering the Anthem was a great beginning of the year project. Those students are ready to understand the vocabulary and learn the proper technique for singing a song a wide range. Doing this song at the beginning of the year also presented the group with many opportunities to model and discuss proper breathing, phrasing, consonant and vowel formation. These are all things that needed to be discussed early and often anyway! Plus I got the opportunity to do a little range testing when each chorus member came to sing the song for me solo for the test. When I started to teach it at this level instead of the elementary the process was much smoother. And the kids enjoyed it! They have a better understanding of why learning this song is important.
I have a feeling that unearthing things in my “Bag of Excuses” is going to become a regular series on this blog. What’s in your bag?
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