Play Together, Stay Together

During the holidays I was fortunate enough to be present at a family friend's house for their holiday music tradition. When all the family and friends gather on Boxing Day, they pull out guitars, an accordian, the spoons, and a huge binder filled with all the songs they've collected over the years. Those who know how play the instruments and everyone sings along with the songs they know. I really enjoyed it, and it started me thinking, "Why don't more families do this?"
Playing music and singing together used to be a common family activity, but it is very rare now. I myself come from a musical background, both my parents were in choirs well into adulthood and my father played piano and trumpet in his youth. My sister and I both took piano and band class. But we never played music as a family. Why is that?
Playing music as part of a group is a hugely social activity. It helps bond the group, and all families could use more bonding activities! Perhaps we have as a society, become accustomed to solitary activities. |Even singing to children is an activity that is becoming less and less common. I think we could use a little more of those "old-fashioned" activities that bring families closer together. 
I was glad to meet a family that still plays music together and consider it a tradition. I hope that when I have a family of my own I can do the same. 

Final Thoughts on ICT

Manitoba Winter Adventures

Manitoba has been hit with a lot of freezing rain lately, and as a result the power has been unreliable to say the least! This weekend the power went out for just over an hour while I was eating supper. So we lit candles and dug up some dusty lanterns so we could actually see what we were eating.
At first I felt a little anxious to be without lights, heat, or all electrical devices, but as we ate supper I realized how nice it was to have no distractions and enjoy company by a softer, warmer, light. I realized how accustomed we have become to being lit up and plugged in 24/7. It was nice to be reminded that we can indeed survive without technology for a short time. And being without those distractions makes you focus more on the people around you. I enjoyed our brief adventure and I may just turn off all my devices to replicate it now and then.

Storytelling in the Digital Age

      One of my assignments this week was to try out a digital storytelling resource. I decided to try out Storybird. I used to work in a library and I loved the children's books. They are so imaginative and artistic. I still love reading them to children. So I loved Storybird!
      On this site you can read online books that members have created, a lot of them are really wonderful. For example this is the featured book:

You can also create your own online books. Artists post their work on the site, and you pick one of them to create your story with. You can choose any work from that artist's selection and make up a story to go along with it. There is a ridiculous amount of artwork to choose from!
      The site gives you a format to fill in to create your story. You don't have a lot of freedom with the free membership, but you can still create some really neat things. You make your cover page first and then add pages to your story. You can choose how much of the page is text and how much is picture. 
     When you are done your story you publish it. You can choose to make it public or private which is a nice feature. A basic membership is completely free and they take steps to make sure your information is kept confidential. I really enjoyed makeing my own story and loved reading the other published books. Check out my book below! 
My Storybird Book

Beyond the Mechanics

All of you out there that perform music know that there is a certain point you reach in your practice where your piece stops being a series of single notes, and turns into music. You reach a level of proficiency that enables you to see the direction and purpose of the lines. Once you get to this stage you are able to make the music mean something, and interpret it in your own way. This is my favourite part of practicing. 
Just recently I realized that this exact same progression exists for conducting. I have spent a year and a half learning patterns and gestures, and I have just reached the point where I can make my conducting mean something more. The mechanics of conducting have started to become automatic, and I can now start using it to show meaning and direction. This gives me hope that I won't always have to concentrate on the pattern, or where my left hand is sitting, or where I need to cue next. 
Everything in music requires practice so that the mechanics become automatic. Then you can reach beyond the technique to the music.

Time Management

As I somehow make my way through the end of term flurry of tests, quizzes, projects, and final exams I have been thinking about time management a lot. If I think I'm busy now, how much more busy will I be when I have report cards to write, tests to make, lessons to plan, trips and performances to organize, etc. etc. etc. One of the greatest things I have learned at university is how to manage my time well. I continue to learn more about it.
As teachers, and music teachers specifically, our schedules are packed. Keeping organized and planning your time well is essential. The sooner we develop systems and attitudes to deal with the load of things we have to do and the stress that comes with it the better. 
One of the things I continue to struggle with is finding a balance between work time and relax time. Everyone has different requirements for relaxing, but we all NEED to do it. You cannot push yourself indefinitely. It's important to learn when you have done enough and need to rest your body, mind, and emotions. This is something that I still have to conquer, but I hope to figure it out before I start my career!

Humor, and a really, really bad orchestra

I think we could all use a little humor, right now being exam time. Humor is also essential to your classroom. We all relax and learn better after laughing. Humor also builds rapport among you and your students. With that in mind take a listen to this! It is a professional orchestra that switched instruments:

Mistakes, Creativity, and the Future

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave a talk at TED (if you don't know what that is you need to Google it ASAP). He spoke about education, and how it is "strip-mining" children of their creativity in the pursuit of what we as a society deem important. He questions the hierarchy of subjects which now falls in this order: math and the languages, humanities, social sciences, and the arts.  

The statement that caught my attention the most was a comment on how education systems praise the "right" answer and create a fear of being wrong. Robinson said in response "...if you're not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original". This statement struck me most because I see  this ideology in my own education.
I personally am afraid of failure. I want the best marks not because they mean I have understood the material, but because I want to be right. Somehow through my childhood I came to associate giving the right answer with succeeding.
 But isn't it true that we learn most through our mistakes? Especially in music, where often you must take risks. I fear improvising for this very reason; it requires taking risks and being wrong sometimes to learn.
For me what I got out of this talk was that we need to teach students that being wrong is not a bad thing. It is a learning opportunity. I also learned that we should encourage students to experiment, and change things, and explore. In music that means that yes, they should be able to play music from what is written on the page, but they should also be able to improvise, arrange, compose, and experiment.
I have placed the video below for those of you that want to see what this talk means for you.

Score Study: Doing it Right

A unit project I am currently working on involves creating a unit resource package for a beginner band piece. I have chosen to do British Isles Suite by Larry Daehn. This package includes: a piano reduction of the entire piece, notation of the important melodic lines (including solfege), a one-page "map" of each theme, and a marked score (measure numbers, important cues, secondary melodies, main melodies, phrase lengths, dynamics, and interpretive ideas). After this comes the lesson materials like rhythmic flashcards, warm-up scales, additional musicianship activities, etc. 
I have recently finished the first section of this assignment and it made me think differently about score study. I don't know that I would mark my score as thoroughly as I had to to complete the requirements for that section, but it served a useful purpose. Looking at that marked score, I can clearly identify every bit of important information. 
The sections I found the most useful were also the hardest to do. This would be the one page "maps" and the piano reduction. I had to go through my 30 page score and analyze it very closely and carefully. Through this exercise I learned a lot about the cadential movement, harmonic movement, and the climaxes of the themes. The piano reduction forced me to go through the parts and identify what was really essential to the overall impression. When I played the reduction it was so much easier to discover where the harmonic progressions occured and where they lead. 
Going through this process taught me a lot about how I need to approach a piece. Hopefully I won't have to do every step every single time I look at a new piece, but at least now I know what to look for, and how to find it.

Let it be LIVE

Yesterday I attended a performance of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. As I sat in the hall with it's beautiful acoustics and watched the passion on the musicians' faces, I started contemplating how we listen to music. I blogged before about how we should take advantage of the convenience of technology for sharing music, but there is a danger in that.
There is no replacement for watching live music being performed. The best recording technology and HD video cannot replicate that experience. If you had a choice between listening to your favourite band on your iPod or going to their concert for free, which would you choose?
There is something about seeing music performed in front of you that is impossible to describe. Feeling the wave of sound pass through you, seeing the expressions on the performers' faces, hearing the music echo through the hall, watching the musicians warm-up, seeing the conduct of a professional...these things and many more all make up a unique experience. We cannot afford to depend solely on recordings and videos to expose students to music. They have to be there and see it happen right in front of them. This is an experience all student musicians can't afford to miss.
           (I still think that recordings and videos have a vital role in the music classroom, but I strongly believe that students should see as much live music as possible)

Blogs: Skepticism to Conversion

I was thinking this week about blogging, and how my attitude towards it has changed. I used to think blogging was weird, and kind of egotistic. Why would anyone want to put their personal thoughts out there for everyone to see??
Then I was shown a bunch of different blogs, most of them created by people in education. I started to see how blogging could be useful to instigate reflection and provide information for others.
Now that I have been writing my own for about two months now, I have completely changed my previous attitude towards blogs. Now that I understand how to use them, it is immensely useful! During the day I am reflecting on what I've learned so that I can post about what changed my thinking the most.  I am reading other people's blogs and benefiting from their experiences. Already I can see it being a tool to network with other people in my field. 
When used productively, blogs can be extremely rewarding, just like all technology.

Emotional Availability

Yet another issue that confronted me at Tempo was the concept of emotional availability. One of the sessions I attended was two new teachers talking about the challenges of doing all the things you haven't been taught. One challenge they described was dealing with being emotionally available for your students. 
Because we teach something that is by nature a social and group activity, students can find it easier to connect with us. We have a responsibility to be open to students when they need to talk, and you are the only one they feel comfortable talking to. This is one aspect of emotional availability.
Another is that we need to be comfortable with our students seeing us as real people. That means that we do have bad days, and we also have exciting events in our lives. It's okay for your students to know that you have strep throat and can't talk loudly, or that your sister is getting married this weekend and you can't wait to stand with her at the front of the church. Knowing these things about you won't hurt your professional relationship, and it can even strengthen the teacher-student bond. 
The other aspect of emotional availability is knowing how far to go. It can be hard to build and keep proper boundaries between you and your students. But they have to understand that although you are there for them, it isn't appropriate for them to text you every detail of their lives, or send you pictures of their party on the weekend, or come to your office ten times a day. And you have to understand that you can't own their problems. Be there for them, help them in every way you can, but you can't allow a student problem to overcome you. It isn't fair to the other students that depend on you if you are unable to teach your best. 
This is one part of teaching that I think I will find difficult. I tend to want to fix everyone's problems, but that isn't always possible. I have to learn when to get involved, and when to let someone better qualified handle the situation. Being aware of this challenge will at least let me go in with my eyes open.

Harmony Practice At Home!

While at Tempo a little while ago, I visited a booth for a resource called Mix My Part. This is a piece of software that allows singers to practice their parts at home without needing a piano or perfect pitch. This software allows teachers to input pieces using up to twelve tracks! The student can access the recordings with only a link and a password. The software requires no downloading and works with most browsers. 
The best feature of this software is that the student can manipulate the recordings. You can adjust the volume of specific tracks; so if for example I was a tenor, I could make the tenor track louder than the other voices. You can mute tracks, mark sections of the recording, or loop one part for repeated practice. With this tool, students can practice their part in the context of all the voices. 
The teacher can upload pieces from GarageBand or any other recording software, I believe you can upload six pieces. Or they also have a Readymade store where you can purchase recordings. 
If you are interested in checking this out, go to

Mix My Part

SmartBoard Games

A classmate and I have to present an activity using the SmartBoard in a music class tomorrow. We decided to use a game we found online at this website
http://www.classicsforkids.com/games/compose/compose.html
It's a composition game where students can drag and drop notes or rests onto a music staff, then listen to their composition play. We thought of many ways you could make this game even more educational by using the SmartBoard. Students could play, clap, or sing each others' compositions easily. Using the pen tools they could write in the chord changes, draw phrase markings, add accidentals, or decorate the melody with non-chord tones. To aid with sight-singing the melodies, students could write in the solfege underneath the notes. 
There are probably even more ways to use this game on the SmartBoard, but these few ideas represent a vast array of musical skills and knowledge. Plus it's fun! 
If anyone knows of more fun ways to use the SmartBoard in a music setting, please feel free to comment and share them!

Education & Hope

Yesterday I attended the Tempo conference in Winnipeg. For those of you who are music educators or learning to become one, I highly encourage that you go! This was my first year going, and I am kicking myself for not finding the time to go in years past. The keynote speaker was Dr. Boonshaft and one thing in particular that he discussed stuck in my brain. He mentioned a quote that goes as follows:            "Education is fundamentally an imaginative act of hope" (Purkey & Novak) 

This statement neatly sums up how I view education. Teaching is an art, and it requires immense creativity and imagination to do well. 
 Now, hope on the other hand. This is crucial to what we do. You see the potential in each student, and you hope that they reach it. You hope that what you do helps them to achieve their potential. You hope that each day you make a difference in a child's life. You hope that you never become callous, bitter, or cynical about your profession. In every bad day, the hope that tomorrow will be better is what keeps you going. 
  It also is not enough to simply hope. The quote states education as an "act of hope". We do not stop at hoping, we act on that hope. Teaching requires that you act to make what you hope happen. And that is what we do every time we step into a classroom. That is why teaching is my passion.

Art, Technology, and Leadership

I really liked this TEDtalk. John Maeda doesn't specifically mention music, but he talks a lot about the intersection of technology, design, art, and leadership. He makes some very interesting points about the ways in which leadership has changed, and why technology should be influenced by art.
I especially liked the way he thinks of technology in the classroom. He believes strongly that neither the old way or the new way are the best, but old + new is. I think there is a lot of truth to this. Both the old way and the new way have pros, and by combining the best parts of each you can create an entirely unique method.

Our Digital Libraries

I am a big believer in the use of recordings and listening in music classrooms. Maybe this stems from the lack of it in my own music education. When I entered university I realized how little I had actually listened to music from different genres. My vocabulary and experience of music was so limited that I have been playing catch-up ever since. 
We have more resources available now than ever before when it comes to access to recorded music. There are countess music streaming sites online, Jango, 8Tracks, and Grooveshark are just a few of the websites out there. You can download music into iTunes or similar programs. We have CD's, MP3 players, iPods, and laptops that can carry music with us wherever we go. There are thousands of radio stations available and Youtube has an infinite number of live music performances waiting at the click of a mouse. 
With all of these resources students are building personal libraries of music that travel with them everyday. I think it is incredibly important that we encourage them to share their libraries with the class and with us. It's also important that we share our own music libraries with our students and help them expand their own. Youtube and iPods should be classroom resources, as well as the CDs we are more familiar with.
Current technology has made it easier than ever before to collect, share, and manipulate recordings into a personal expression of who we are. It is our responsibility to give students the opportunity to add to and share their personal digital libraries. I hope to give my students a wider exposure to music than I had, and that will be accomplished through the vast array of technology available.

I have to teach tonality??

This week we have been talking about tonality. Specifically, how to teach tonality. I came to the important realization that I wasn't taught a sense of tonality, and that I don't really have a sense of tonality. If you sing me a pattern with the leading tone, I can sing you the tonic. But I don't have a strong sense of intonation, I struggle with learning by ear, and fight to gain the all important skill of audiation. 
I am a fourth year music education student, and I don't have these necessary skills. And the reason for this is that the way I was taught music focused very much on reading notation. I learned what the note looked like and what it was called before I ever learned what it sounded like. This has held me back as a musician and a teacher.
Now that I have realized this I have two challenges:
        1. Develop my sense of tonality
        2. Learn how to teach a sense of tonality
I want to give my students the advantages I didn't have. So I have to figure out ways to develop my students' sense of tonality. We all have specific challenges as teachers, and I believe this is one of mine.

Computerized Report Cards

While in Band/Jazz Methods today, we were discussing assessment and report cards came up (naturally). I found out that report cards are all computerized now and you actually cannot write your own comments. You have to pick from a pre-made list of comments!
Now, I don't know about everyone else, but the personal comments are the most important part of report cards to me. I don't just want to know what grade I received, I want to know what the teacher thinks are my strengths, and what I can work on to be better. Choosing from a list of comments just does not perform the same function. It almost makes them meaningless. It is no longer a personal communication from teacher to student, but a required fill in the blank section.
I think it's great that report cards can be done on computers now, I can't imagine hand-writing 400 different report cards! But I do think in the case of pre-made comments, that the convenience of technology has deprived students and teachers of a valuable communication. Not to say that this is the fault of technology, it is simply being used in a way that is a meaningless time saver.

What do we really know?

Here's a little brain bender for the end of your week! A thought provoking short video from TED.com.

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_an_animated_tour_of_the_invisible.html

Commanding Attention While Looking Your Students' Age...

I am taking Classroom Management right now and have been thinking a lot about what I think will be effective for me. Now, what you need to know about me is that I am a small person, and I also look very young. During student teaching placements I have been mistaken for a student! So I don't have the authoritative natural presence that some teachers are lucky enough to have.
Instead, I focus on building positive relationships with my students on an individual level. Once you know their names and they will come into class early to chat with you, it's much harder for them to act out in class. The trick is getting the students to want to work, then they just will. And if most of the class likes you as a person, there is peer pressure to pay attention and follow what you say.
This worked quite well for me in my first placement. I still did have difficulty in the classes where there was less of a chance for me to get to know my students (ie. Music and Technology where every student was glued to a computer). But I feel like this is a good base to build my management philosophy on. I look forward to learning how I can establish a classroom presence without an intimidating size or voice!

"Betelehemu"

Here's a fun video I stumbled across while listening to music on YouTube. It is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing a song called "Betelehemu". I LOVE the energy in this piece! You can't help but get your foot tapping along with it!
On an educational note, this would be perfect for any age group, as it is easily adaptable to fit your class. I also think many students get excited when there are percussion instruments involved (and who can blame them). I am also a strong believer in exposing kids to music from around the world, and this piece would be a perfect way to bring that into your classroom.
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7WdQ1xSkk4&feature=related

Monday Morning Epiphany

So today as I looked over my notes from Schleuter's A Sound Approach to Teaching Instrumentalists one comment I had starred caught my eye. What I had written down was a paraphrase from Chapter 1. It goes like this, "fingerings = notation, NOT sound". 
Let me go back a bit and explain. 
Growing up I took piano lessons as my first experience with making music. I learned if you see this note, you press this key. I never thought about this note equaling this sound. As I began taking band class this trend continued. I was never taught to think about the notes on the page as sounds, I simply thought "Oh, that's a D, I need to press these keys."
This may seem like simply a word puzzle, but it is the basis of how I used to think about music. Even now, in the fourth year of my degree, I have an extremely hard time with aural skills and the thought of improvisation terrifies me! I am quite inflexible as a musician, because I was never really taught to use my ears. Not to bash my teachers however, they were fantastic and gave me a love for music that will last a lifetime.
What does this mean for my teaching?
Well, I hope to help my students become well-rounded musicians. I want to give them the advantages I didn't have. I will incorporate easy improvisation exercises and get them to sing pitches before they play. I will ask them what they hear not what they see. 
As difficult as it is to realize your weaknesses, ultimately they make you better at what you do. So I hope I can take this epiphany and use it to improve my teaching.

Technology in the Classroom

Technology is a huge part of our society. As a future educator I realise the importance of teaching kids how to use technology effectively. Our job is to prepare students for the "real world" outside of the classroom, and technology is part of that world. 
I struggle though, with how much technology should be implemented in the classroom. I do believe that certain skills (like proof-reading, addition, and music-making, among others) should be taught first without technology. How can you use technology effectively without first knowing how to perform that task without the aid of gadgets? 
I am currently taking a class that will teach me how to integrate technology in my classroom. I look forward to what I can learn about different software and hardware that will enhance my classroom. Hopefully I can strike a balance while teaching that will ensure technology is a tool, not a crutch.