Tool #9

Students could use Jing to take a picture of something they are working on and share it with other students or their teacher. Teachers could use Jing to create a training video for students, showing them how to access their san folder or how to notate a song in music software. I have a project with kindergarten and 3rd grade where I record the students singing a simple song and then I save it to their personal folder on the network. I usually use class time to show them how to access it and listen to it, but I could make a training video that they could view during their computer or library time.

Skype could be used to share performances with other schools. While I always believe that performing for a live audience is the best option, Skype would offer opportunities for teachers to perform for one another and their classes. If the schedule or budget does not permit students to have live performances then teachers could set up a performance and broadcast it to another school in the district.

I have been using Skype for personal calls for about a year now. I am able to talk with friends in other states and see my nieces and nephews who live in Michigan. I really enjoy using Skype because it seems like the other person is in the room with you.

Tool # 8

I found my first video on YouTube. It is a performance of the song "Defying Gravity" from the Musical Wicked. I would use this video in the classroom to introduce a unit on Musical Theater. Aside from taking the students to see a Musical, the next best thing would be to show them a video of what it is like and then have the students perform a few excerpts from a Musical. The second video that is posted here is "The Dance of the Reed Flutes" from The Nutcracker ballet. This video clip could help to explain ballet to students who have never seen or experienced ballet for themselves. Both of these videos meet the music TEKS that address how music relates to other subjects and other art forms.

Tool # 8 Defying Gravity Tony Awards

Tool # 7

I am very familiar with iMovie for Mac because I already use this program to edit classroom videos. I have an Opera Video project and a Music Video project that I do with my 4th and 5th graders. Students must act out an opera using a classroom video camera. Then I edit the clips down to make a video that I show on the morning announcements. I made this video using PhotoStory 3 for Windows. I was not familiar with this program. It was fairly simple to upload the pictures and add text. I wanted to add a voice-over, but I do not have a microphone for my laptop. So I added some music that I found on one of the suggested websites. All in all it was a pretty easy process.



Like many others, I struggled to upload the video.

Tool #6 Wikis

Most of my experience with wikis has to do with Wikipedia. I have used it extensively to research all different topics. In a music classroom, students could use a wiki to plan and organize a talent show. They could each submit songs or acts for approval by the teacher and check back to see if their ideas were approved. Then the teacher could put the acts in order and the students would have an order for the program. The students could then help to create a handout for the talent show on the wiki.

Between teachers a wiki would be a very useful tool for sharing ideas, posting links to helpful websites, organizing a choir festival, etc. I get e-mails from teachers all year long with links to helpful websites. Once the e-mail is buried under all my other e-mail, I can't find it any more. If teachers were sharing websites on a wiki or a site like delicious or diigo then they would be easy to find.

#5 Social Bookmarking

The following are a few websites I found while browsing the social bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo.

Creatingmusic.com

toytheater.com

wildmusic.org

The tags I used to find all three of these websites were "Elementary" and "Music". It seems to me that a tag is like a keyword you type in to a search engine.

I explored membership in both Diigo and Delicious and found that Delicious was more user friendly for me. I thought that Diigo was difficult to understand and required more time to understand how to use it than Delicious. So I joined Delicious and added the buttons to my browser.

I think that Delicious and Diigo would be most useful in the classroom as a research tool. Teachers can set up a class account and add tags for students to research different topics. For instance in the music classroom some tags might be: worldmusic, instruments, and composers.

In addition, a site like this will help with lesson planning. Suppose a teacher wants to show a website for a particular lesson. He/she could tag the website to a Delicious or Diigo site for quick access during the lesson to show on an activeboard or screen.

Tool #4 Google Reader and Google Docs

I set up my Google reader and I am following a few blogs:

Free Technology for Teachers

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day

http://fairyprincipal.blogspot.com

Mary's Art Spot

MWE Transition and Rebuilding

While I think this is a handy way to keep all of the blogs I want to read in the same place. I find it difficult to spend very much time reading blogs online. My eyes get tired and there is a constant flow of new materials coming in to read. It is a little overwhelming for me personally.

However, for the classroom, I could easily set up a Google reader for the students to follow that includes all of the blogs pertaining to our school or district music events. It might be possible for them to access a school Google Reader site from the Library. Then students could follow blogs like the music blog, construction for MWE blog, or the Purple Martins blog all in one place! There would have to be one adult in charge of the Reader so that there is accountability for blogs that students are exposed to.

Google docs is much more exciting to me. The possibilities are endless. I created a grocery list to share with my husband at work and he edited it and then I printed it out. For school purposes we could create shared calendars, a timeline for planning events, newsletters to be edited by each grade level team, letters home to parents, etc. This is very useful for documents that need to be translated into bilingual materials before they are sent home. It eliminates the need for 2 and 3 copies of everything.

In the music classroom, Google Docs could be used to help students create and notate new songs as a grade level. Each class could work on a song by writing words to a song in a Google Doc and sharing it with other classes. Also, students could create a power point for a song and share it with each class. They could create power points to go with their concerts as well.

Teachers can share lesson plans and assessment forms and get input from other teachers. I love it!