Class Reflection 4/27

Last Friday Professor Riley had his wife come in and explain to us about how the Smart Board works.  Mrs. Riley showed us some pretty cool stuff that I didn't know the Smart Board could do.  The thing that stood out was that you could create fun games on the Smart Board to help your students learn or review musical topics.  Smart Board is very user friendly too and it is easy to manage and making the games are so easy anyone can make a game in a matter of minutes.  Mrs. Riley also demonstrated to us that you can write on the board and there is an option to make your writing typed! I was blown away by this, for me my hand writing is not the greatest and this tool to change it to computer font is so crazy!  Having Mrs. Riley come in and show us what the Smart Board can do, really opened up the possibilities of the Smart Board being used more in many more classes.  This technology is something I will definitely consider in my classroom one day.

Class Reflection 4/20

Last Friday in class we talked about how important it was to know how to make videos and use imovie.  To me I already knew that it was important, but Professor Riley had to clarify to some students who were confused by outlining what makes it important to education.  One of the things it can be useful is with recording what the students are doing, so that you as the teacher can show it to the parents, so they can see the progress their kids are making.  This is also a great strategy with posting new songs and projects the students are doing on the school website, so it gets the school involved.  Some more important ideas can be shown on my last blog post about imovie.

Another thing we learned was more information about Podcasts.  What are cool about Podcasts is that they are like video radio stations, and people can subscribe to them.  Also what is cool about this you can make weekly Podcasts of your class and the parents can subscribe to them and they can follow the progress of your class weekly, which is good for communication with the parents and to have them see what you are actually doing.  This week I get to make my own Podcast! So ill see how that goes, so that I can learn more about it.

4/13 Class Reflection

Last Friday Professor Riley talked about a video recording program called iMovie.  What Professor Riley did was that he interviewed one student in our class and asked her different questions pertaining to how she was influenced by music and why she wants to be a music teacher.  And during this interview Professor Riley took different angles of the student and recorded another section of the student just playing on the piano.  And then Professor Riley put the recorded video in the iMovie program.  What this program does is that it can edit the footage in a way so that you can cut things out and move different pieces of the footage cut and displace it in another spot in the interview.

 Also Professor Riley explained to us that the program can also create a B-Roll.  B-Roll is footage that is shown while an audio is being played from another video.  This is cool because it can help with awkward transitions and can be more visually appealing to the audience.  I thought this was a really cool program and I cannot wait to try it out to learn more about it.


To me the program iMovie can be used for students in my classroom when they are giving presentations or even when I am trying to explain a topic to the parents and I can show what the students have done in the classroom and the iMovie program makes it easy to edit the videos and add the visual aid of the B-Roll.  

3/30 Class Reflection

Today in class we had Dr. Ryan teach us all about Smart Music.  This was very new to me and I never heard about this technology until now and I find it to be very interesting and very cool! What this program does is that it can play your solo accompaniment for you while you play your solo.  The really cool thing about that though is that it actually follows you and can actually act like a really accompanist!! I did not believe it at first, but Dr. Ryan played a solo for us with the program and he changed the tempo by slowing  his part down or speeding  his part up and the Smart Music followed him! Dr. Ryan even held out a note and it waited for him to play the next note and it did not jump ahead and it actually followed him! My mind was blown.

The next really cool thing about this music program is that there are pieces of band music on it and you can have your band play along with it.  And there is an assessment option on the program that can show where your band made some mistakes and it will tell you exactly where you or your band messed up.  The next cool thing is that it can actually play the music for you and you can set the music at different tempos and then the indivudual players can play it by themselves to see how well they did.  Building off that idea the teacher can set up assignments for playing tests for the students online and the students can play it on their computer and it can get recorded and their score will be posted to show how well they did and then it can be sent to the teacher.  This technology can be very useful in the future when I start teaching.  This is something I definitely would want to look into more when I get a chance to try Smart Music out and share it with my students.

3/27 Class Reflection

On class Friday we learned about many different topics.  One topic we talked about was "gamification" or "gamifying".  What "gamification" means is that you turn an exercise or a usually boring activity into a game.  For example more and more schools are using different strategies to review the topics learned in class, in a fun way like a game. For music theory there are a lot of games online that help the students practice their audiation and it gives the students their score out of a certain number of points and the students work to improve their score.  One website I use that is very useful is Musictheory.net.  Also "gamifying" is used for physical fitness as well.  For example Wii Fit, Nike+ and Xbox Kinect and many others that use the idea of fitness as a game to the person playing it.

Another topic we learned in class is about the Khan Academy.  I learned about this in my high school, I thought it was really cool and it is very beneficial to the students and to help students with tutoring.  In my chemistry class we actually used this strategy with having all the lectures online for homework.  And during class we would do our labs and homework.  I really enjoyed it because I was able to stop the slide or video and take notes and I can control the lecture the entire time.  I thought it was very beneficial and I thought it helped me learn chemistry and it was fun going to class and not listen to a lecture, but actually get some work done.  Overall the Khan Academy is very interesting and I cannot wait to watch those videos, so I can learn more about it.