Teaching Music With Technology

It seems like you can’t go a day without hearing about someone who has misrepresented themselves in some way in their online presence.  A dating profile, email scams claiming prizes or cash, or extra payment if you’ll put your item for sale on a truck after you’ve shipped the time and cashed some crazy check from some other country.  Another digital hot topic is online interactions.  A misrepresentation on a dating profile, cyber-bullying, phishing - the list goes on and on! Digital citizenship, at it’s most basic level, is how an individual presents themselves online.  It can include anything from a social media profile to commenting on an anonymous comment board.  It can encompass honesty, integrity, or whether the lack of those traits can land you in prison for a very long time. As an educator, every opportunity to teach and emulate a positive and honest digital citizenship is a pretty big deal.  I think it is important for kids to understand how impo...

As teachers, it is important to know what the professional expectations and outcomes should be - both as an educator and what our students are expected to gain or become from their time in our classroom. One of the most valuable resources for this is the Inernational Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).  ISTE lists standards for educators such as “seeking opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success” and “inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibily participate in the digital world.”  For students standards include “students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes” and “students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts, and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.” (ISTE.org) Sometimes it can be challenging to come up with fresh ways to implement standards every day, every semester, every year...

Music is often considered a language that is universal.  When a composition is well crafted the composer can portray events, emotions, and feelings that can be understood by everyone who hears it.  In a classroom, the teacher is much like the composer in this analogy.  They need to design a curriculum that can be understood by all who are in their classroom.  Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is how to “compose” a curriculum that incorporates different learning styles, different ability levels, race, or any other differential that may cause difficulty in a single-stream type of curriculum.  Research has shown that there is “unmistakable diversity in our nervous systems; that is, the nervous system ‘wires up’ differently for each person.”  (Harvard) This means that everyone learns and absorbs information differently - as diverse and unique as a fingerprint. Research also shows that there is a correlation between emotion and learning.  (Harvard) W...

Welcome!  As part of my Instructional Media class, we have been assigned to create a blog to keep throughout the semester.  It will be interesting to see where this takes us.  To begin, we were asked specific questions to answer. 1. What is digital literacy and why is it important?  Digital literacy is the skill set you possess to work with (or around) technology.  For some, this may begin with something as simple as "how do I turn this thing on?" and continue to something as complex as creating programming code for a state-of-the-art surgical robot.  As complex machines and computing systems continue to develop, it will become increasingly important to know how to navigate these systems as they are implemented in various areas of everyday life.  Handwritten letters delivered by a mailman are rare anymore.  The bulk of communication in the US happens by text, email, or social media outlets.  Staying connected has never been easier, ...