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...