John Cage iphone/Droid App

On a train ride to Manhattan I was discussing with a friend the music of John Cage. His music is very out of the ordinary and sometimes hard to understand. Many people debate about whether or not some of John Cage's music can actually be categorized as music. I have always wondered if discussing the music of John Cage would be something interesting for a general music class. The work of John Cage is based mostly on his unique philosophy of music, and I think it is important for my students to see different perspectives and ideas about music making. During our conversation my friend asked if I have ever seen the John Cage phone App for prepared piano. I had never heard of this App and when he opened it for me I spent 15 minutes of our train ride clicking around and exploring the different sounds. What a cool App! A lot of school districts are starting to use ipads in their classrooms. If I were to work at a school who had access to any type of ipad I would definitely use this App in my general music class. The app even allows you to record and play back your own compositions! I think this will be a great way to introduce my students to modern music.

Here is a youtube video of the App itself:

And here is a video describing the actual prepared piano of John Cage:

The following is a link with information on getting the App
  http://johncage.org/cagePiano.html

Smart Music

http://www.smartmusic.com/

I have been trying to decide if this program "smart music" would be a valuable resource for my future student's education. From this video it seems like the students enjoy using the program but how much are they actually learning? Could this be distracting in the classroom? This program is one of the most popular methods right now but it still makes me think what is wrong with traditional music education? I don't believe that this program is bad or unnecessary, but I do believe that you can accomplish the same thing without this fancy technology.

Interactivity #4

Beatlemania Lesson Plan:  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_4kpwwiNg77RTg5b0JLem1lZjA/edit?usp=sharing

Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av4kpwwiNg77dHYwakFpeEQ2OGZsbTBSVk5JcHJKdXc&usp=sharing


"Beatlemania" was a lesson I wrote last semester during fieldwork for an 8th grade Rock and Roll History class. When I first wrote this lesson plan I was very uncomfortable using the smartboard in the classroom so I tried to limit my smartboard use as much as possible. The amount of time it took for me to fiddle around with it took away too much of class time. I was however comfortable enough to use the smartboard to play youtube videos related to our discussion topics.

I am currently student teaching at the same school. The students I had last semester have rotated to a different course so my Co-op and I have a brand new set of students. I chose this lesson plan because I had the opportunity to teach the lesson again. Why not use this opportunity to modify a lesson plan that I will actually use? I actually taught my modified lesson plan in class and it went very well. The students were excited to see their handwriting blown up on the big screen. I think it was something that they didn't expect. They knew that we would be using the posters to start discussion topics, but when I told them I would scan their images and put it on the smartboard they didn't believe me.

The first time I taught this lesson I tried to fit everything into one 45 minute period. The students enjoyed the carousel activity because they got to draw fun pictures and write stuff with markers, but because of time constraints the real discussion I wanted got lost. I decided that a two day lesson would be best. After looking at their finished posters I realized that they also didn't meet the expectations that I thought they would. Their comments were undeveloped, they didn't react to other students opinions, and the pictures they drew had little to do with the information I presented to them. When I modified my lesson plan I decided it would be best to explain what I wanted from them by using Facebook as an example. Most of them have probably been on Facebook before and know what it is like to write on a friends wall or comment on pictures. I wanted to let them know that they are allowed to write down reactions to other people's comments. With the new group of students they were able to understand what I wanted from them by using the Facebook example.

After some practice, I became a little more comfortable with the smartboard so I decided it would be really great to figure out a way to get scanned images of their posters to put on the big screen. This is what really made the discussion part of my lesson stronger. The students were excited to see their handwriting and pictures up in front of them. I made sure to let them know I was putting their images up on the screen and reminded them that everything they wrote is anonymous and will stay anonymous if they wish.  With out having these scanned images, the students would have never been able to choose what topics they wanted to talk about.

A student of mine taught me how to make a Prezi using www.prezi.com. I used this website to organize the scanned images and videos. Putting videos on the prezi was a relief because the students always want me to click on the videos that pop up in the sidebar. This allowed no distractions! The following link is the actual Prezi that I made for the class.

http://prezi.com/a910xts3pcoa/the-beatles/?kw=view-a910xts3pcoa&rc=ref-31264905

Interactivity #3: Technology Inventory For Music

I found this activity to be very practical. Music educators are constantly making inventories for the endless number of instruments and supplies needed for the music departments. Organization is crucial when holding responsibility for so many materials. Music educators are also asked very often what kinds of supplies they may need the next year. Creating an inventory such as the one we made for interactivity #3 is something that would be great to have in that situation. It can be a wish list of technologies you want for your future classroom. 

This was the most interesting group project that I have ever had to participate in.  have never used Google Doc before and did not really know what it was until we were assigned this group project. I am grateful that I had members in my group who were somewhat familiar with Google Doc. If it weren't for them I would have never been able to figure it out! The best part about Google Doc is that you can see everyone working at the same time. I found myself staring at the screen watching new things pop up every few minutes. The most difficult part about this project was just deciding how we were going to put all of our ideas together. I think the best choice for us was agreeing on a few different categories first, and then plug in our individual technologies. If we hadn't agreed on categories first, it would have taken a lot longer group each technology together.


This being a group activity, I learned about some interesting teaching materials from my other group members that I may have not found myself, especially for recording and music notation software. There is so much out there and it is hard to dig through what technologies are appropriate!

     I believe that the change of technology within the time periods presented in the video above can be evidence of changes in music education. The video presents a radio station that broadcasted music education programs. I did not know this existed until I saw this video. I am curious to what may have been broadcasted. Did they play recoding of actual student ensembles? I am curious to know how an elementary school band would have sounded like in the 1920's compared to an elementary school band today.
     I believe that what changed music education the most as a result from changes in technology was the competition with Russia. Priorities of American schools changed and art programs may have been pushed aside as physics classes and math courses were reinforced more strictly. I do however believe that music education was and other art programs were better embraced than they are today. The current priorities of American education have even less concerns for art programs.

You can express yourself in less than a second through social media, but it will never compare to the truest and oldest form of human expression. Music making.

Technology as Autobiography

Top three forms of technology I use for communication:

1.   Cell phone
2. Facebook
3. Email

These are the three main uses of technology I utilize for communication. As much as I want to deny it, I have been sucked into the world of text messaging, emailing and social media like the rest of the United States population. These three forms of technology, cell phone, Email, and Facebook have become such a huge part of everyday life that we even found ways to do all three at once, through our cell phones. With our cell phones, we can make phone calls, text messages, connect to Facebook, check emails, and even download Facebook instant messaging apps that allow us to do basically the same thing text messaging does. It is for this reason why I have chosen cell phone use as the number one form of technology used for communication.  If even I admit to using these technologies a little more than I want to, than as a teacher I must ask myself, are my students even more sucked into this technology world than I am? 

In the video above, the student Olivia expresses her love for her Myspace page. Before Facebook became popular, Myspace was where young people wanted to be. I think what attracted Olivia to Myspace is exactly what has attracted most teenagers to the website. Myspace gave teenagers what they naturally crave, which is the freedom to express yourself publicly. Olivia stated that she would spend up to five hours on the computer looking at other people’s pages or fixing up her own.  I can relate to Olivia in this video because Myspace started to become very popular when I was in high school.  I would spend hours decorating my Myspace page and like Olivia, my Myspace become a way for me to express myself. In high school, your profile page was just as important as the clothes you wore.

Myspace died out about five years ago when Facebook started to take over the social media world. Facebook does not give you as much freedom as far as decorating your profile, but it gives society something else that is a little more powerful, a voice. I find the Facebook status an amazing form of expression and I believe that many sometime take it a little too seriously. What is even more amazing than the Facebook status is the News Feed, which gives you updates of what your friends are saying instantly! In one click almost the whole world can know what you ate that day.

The biggest difference between Myspace and Facebook is that while Myspace was an expression of one’s self through posts of pictures, song lyrics, videos, and cool designs, Facebook  is a documentation of one’s life. It seems as if Facebook has realized this too and has taken full advantage of it when they added their Timeline feature to everyone’s Facebook page.

In the video above, these young people seem have similar thoughts on technology as I do as far as the most common uses. I use technology for a lot of the same reasons as they do.  The difference between myself and young people is that I know when to draw the line between healthy uses of technology and unhealthy uses of technology. This is one thing I worry about for my students. Are they spending too much time typing questions into Google, playing video games, and downloading apps? Do they even know that there is a point where excessive technology use can be unhealthy?

 As teachers I think we should be constantly asking these questions. It is ok for our students to know that we too use technology the same was as they do because we have to be their technology role model. However, in order to be a technology role model, we have to make healthy technology choices ourselves. Because social media and cell phone use are still fairly new, healthy technology use is not something that is commonly thought about, so it is up to us to decide in ourselves what it means to make healthy technology choices.

As far as student learning, I believe technology can be a great resource for learning. One young person in the video put it very well saying that “we have all the information in the world and we can learn from it by deciding what information can be useful towards our goals.”

When I teach I am constantly reminded by my students how different they are in the technology world as I am. A student asked me a question the other day that opened my mind to the technology world in my student’s perspective. After learning about Nirvana in Rock and Roll History class, a student asked, “If there was no internet in the 90s, then how did people watch music videos?” A question that seemed so silly to me was a great concern to my student. This made me realize that although my students and I engage in the same activities on Facebook and text messaging, our technology histories are different. I come from a different generation where I had no idea what an Email was, where my students have had the word Email in their vocabulary since they first started talking.

I realize that there will always be this gap between teacher and student as far as technology and I hope that one day all teachers will be aware that no matter how much more your students know about technology than you do, the teacher will always be the students’ technology role model.