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.