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.

About Me

             My name is Melanie Colby and I am a Music Education major. Clarinet is my main instrument. I do not have a preference of where I teach once I graduate. I enjoy teaching all age groups. I really enjoy teaching general music because of the creativity it allows for lesson planning. I also really love conducting and really hope to have a band or orchestra to direct one day.

                I am familiar with basic music technology. I can operate Finale and Garage band which are both similar to most music editing software.  What makes me most nervous are microphone and recording devices. Sometimes they seem like a whole new world to me.

                My main view on techonology is very simple. I see technology in everything. It is very easily forgotten that musical instruments are a very complex form of technology. Just because they aren’t wired with electricity doesn’t mean they aren’t a complex piece of technology. Without this complex technology I would never have my clarinet!

                What I want to gain from this class are new perspectives on technology in the classroom including what can be useful, and what can be a distraction. I am also interested in how other subject areas view technology in their classrooms.