Final Blog

Well... here we are at the end of our journey together. It has been interesting blogging about my TPTE486 doings. I have one follower, who admittedly doesn't even keep up with the blog. I think this is a great form of communication for people who need to use it, and it could potentially be a positive resource for communication with parents and students in my classroom, but I belive there are other means for accomplishing the same task through other forms, such as using the announcements page on my website. Of course, both are similar, but it seems to be a bit easier for the type of communication I will need.

Here's to the end of the journey... at least for now.

Website

Here is a link to my website.

It has information about band, including resources for band, an mock announcements page, a teacher bio, and examples of many of the technology projects I have completed in TPTE 486.

My Great Movie: Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words

This is my iMovie; it provides an introduction to my life and the things that are important to my through pictures. The caption is the Sixth Movement of "Lincolnshire Posy": Lost Lady Found. I enjoyed this project because it allowed me to synthesize several media-types into one cohesive presentation that introduces me through multiple modalities: photos, words, and music.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets could be useful for interactive worksheets for students in a music/band class. In my line of work as a music director, however, I would imagine that spreadsheets will be even more useful to me in record keeping for music ensembles and organizations: budgets, inventories, charts, organizing information, instrumentation assignments, etc.

Inspiration Project: Major Composers for Early Band (Early 20th Century)

This is my Inspiration project, which presents information about the major composers for early band. These composers were active in the early 20th Century. The visual diagram presents information such as, the birth and death dates of the composers, the primary thing they are known for, and a representative band composition. This information is supported by links to websites, audio recordings of the band compositions, and the publishing information for "The Winds of Change," the book from which the information came.
This is a nice project to tie together information about the composers, photos of the composers to make them more real to the students, and audio files all in one location.

Inspiration

Inspiration is a program that helps create digital diagrams that can be used to aid in classroom instruction. Visual learning software programs like Inspiration allow he teacher or the student to add links to definitions, video clips, or internet sites in order to illustrate a point of to demonstrate what has been learned. Once a diagram has been completed, the outline view of Inspiration may be exported to a word processor, thus providing writing support, such as a dictionary, thesaurus, word prediction, and text to speech. Visual learning tools allow students to create concept maps that show the relationships between concepts, analyze characters in a story, and create a plan for a multimedia or web project. Further, it has been proven that pictures or illustrations can enhance learning if the picture or illustration is related to the text and helps the learner to understand the text.

As referenced above, there are many useful applications for software like Inspiration. This could certainly be a useful program for presentation of concepts in music that lend themselves to this format of presentation, such as learning about historical/cultural connections to music, composers, etc.

Scavenger Hunt Screen Shot

Scavenger hunts... these can be very creative activities, or they can be "just enough to get by" or to "just fulfill the requirements". I believe that students should not be given too many criteria for scavenger hunts as far as the actual design of the presentation: this will allow the students to be more creative.

As far as using the scavenger hunt, I believe it could be useful in a general music classroom, especially if you could integrate the instruments or music into it. Perhaps a "sounds" scavenger hunt might be an interesting idea. As far as a band classroom, I doubt I would use a scavenger hunt. In band we focus on a very special technology: instruments.

Christmas Cantata Animoto Video

Digital Photo Collection

Lessons Plans

After completing designing an interactive, technology-based class activity, we were instructed to design a lesson plan for a lesson that includes the activity. Our (Doriscell and myself) activity involved guided research on Beethoven and Mozart, which incorporates music and deafness (Beethoven was deaf by his later life). Students compare their lives, styles of music, contribution to music history, and contrast their differences.
We created a lesson plan in the context of a music class, where we incorporate deafness into the lesson. We were able to include three Content Standards in the plan, 6.0: Listening and Analyzing, 8.0 Interdisciplinary Connections, and 9.0: Historical and Cultural Relationships.
Time to finish it...

WebQuest

Today, in class, we learned about WebQuests. My group worked on High School English webquests. It appears to me that the elementary webquests were better, more exciting, more useful, and more engaging. The WebQuest is about 14 years old and according to the ones we looked at, those pages appear to use 14-year-old technology. It seems to me that WebQuests need to be made much more exciting and technologically up-to-date.
In anycase, I look forward to learning more.

Wiki

Today, we began working on our Wiki pages. We have to collaborate with other students in other sections. My wiki page is about music, which is a bit general at this point. After I find out the concentrations areas of my colleagues we will be able to better organize and orient out wiki.
This will, perhaps, be one of the most useful tools for a band classroom.
I look forward to learning more.

Wiki day!

Today in class we began learning about wikis.
I made a wiki page at http://tpte486.pbworks.com/ChristopherGoodson
Wikis appear to be really useful tools for teaching and learning. The "In Plain English" video on wikis was quite informative and helpful. I would never have thought of using them in that way.

Next, we will work in our instructional groups (Music) to put together a wiki page about our special area. I look forward to finding out with whom I will be working on this project.

Binge Blogging

In an effort to become more adept at blogging, I am binge blogging this morning...

Speaking of technological integratedness, the private school for whom I work has recently began using a web-based school administration software that I have been learning to use. It is called "RenWeb". The program allows for tracking of grades, attendance, even the school lunch menu. One of the most convenient uses involves the ability to send emails to students, staff, and parents through the program. That feature is much more convenient than putting together an email list in outlook. The attendance and grading features will become more useful in time, but early on, setting up the grade-book and attendance tracking are frustrating and slow. For now, I am still using the paper grade-book.

Sometimes change is slow. Of course, that seems to be especially highlighted in my field of work, where music and how to play and teach music hasn't changed all that much over many, many years. Certainly, there are countless ways to involve more technology, but when it comes down to it, there is only one way to put an instrument in your face and play it correctly. Technology can help, but band still involves physical skills that have to be experienced, so matter how convenient of technologically advanced the teacher becomes.

Food for thought...

Reflection on Website Evaluation Activity

Prompt:

How did this activity assist you (or not) in meeting the learning objectives associated with the evaluation of websites to use in your classroom?

Reflection:

The activity sheet presented important criteria that should be considered when evaluating a website for use in an academic classroom. The worksheet sought to evaluate the website with objective criteria in order to create a quality judgement related to the beneficial use of the website. This is an excellent starting point, but some websites provide more subjective benefits that cannot be easily measured. Wikipedia, for example, is not the strongest website for academic use per the criteria presented on the evaluation sheet; however, I believe that wikipedia has many benefits. It compiles current and well-referenced information from many sources, yet many academics will not allow it to be cited as a reference. There is, of course, value that that decision as quality-control is questionable, but definitely improving. Whether wikipedia can be cited or not, it provides an excellent beginning to research with an overview of the topic and references that the student can follow and cite. Additionally, wikipedia is becoming an ever-more popular website that many people use each day for their own "personal" research. I expect it to become more popular in time.

Deaf Culture Wiki

Setting up my blog - First time blogging...

I never expected to have a blog on the internet, but here I am (thanks to TPTE 486). This should be an interesting experiment, especially since I do not generally post any information or thoughts to the internet. Sure, I have accounts on social networking sites, but I don't generally put my thoughts out there. I look forward to seeing how this turns out.