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.