Final Summative Blog Post

I think that ICT can play an important part in the music classroom and can contribute to students' creativity, and can allow them to learn how to grow with technology in music. I think that composition softwares, such as Finale and Garage Band can be very useful in helping students to create their own songs and to collaborate with other students on projects that will get them familiar with music and with the various things that they can do with technology regarding music.

I think that through educating students on the importance of their identity on the internet that they will learn what is acceptable to put on the internet, and what they should keep away from it. This is an important habit to have: knowing what is appropriate and what is not. This will help them in the future to obtain a job and keep it. Their lives should not be affected by what they post on the internet. 

ICT is having a rather large affect on school systems today. There is a much larger emphasis on the Internet and using devices like laptops, cellphones, tablets, etc. This can make classrooms easier to manage: Everything is available at the students' fingers, and with the availability of laptops and laptop carts, none of the students even have to leave the classroom. Students can transfer their assignments with ease to teachers, and are better able to communicate with them if they have questions or need extra help. However, it also can be a major distraction. Gaming, texting, and social networking can be detriment to students' attention spans and can affect their ability to do homework, seeing as they are too busy tweeting, messaging, playing, etc. to focus on their schooling. 

During the semester, our ICT class was given many applications, websites, and resources that can help to keep both ourselves and our students organized and interested in what they are learning. I enjoyed using Symbaloo and Pearltrees and other websites of the like that can help to keep internet resources organized and easy to find. Animoto and Prezi are a good way to have students make their own presentations or videos using their own ideas or pictures. Tools like Jing can make life easier also. I also really enjoyed learning about the various websites that allow you to create your own. It was a good experience to create my own website and find out really how accessible and easy it is. Blogging was also a good experience. 

And with that, I say goodbye to first semester!

E-Portfolio

I am currently putting on the finishing touches of my e-Portfolio, and I think after the work that I have put into it that it will be worthwhile. I was skeptical at first, and am still unsure if I will leave it available for all to see after this course, but will most likely repost it when I am looking for jobs in the future. I think that it is a good tool to have and will be more useful for me when I am looking for employment.

We are almost finished or final project for this class, and am looking forward to presenting it tomorrow! Hopefully all goes well and that everyone enjoys it. We did have to make some adjustments to our project as the tool we decided to use was not working for us. For some reason, the tool Jing did not let us save our videos that we made and this forced us to come up with a new plan of action for our project. Sometimes technology can be very frustrating, especially when we are depending on it.

Although the last week of classes for music students was last week, we still are continuing with this class for the rest of this week. This means that this will be my second last blog post, and my final post will be a sort of summative post with different requirements for our ICT class.

"" It came in like a wrecking ball ""

Whew! School is almost done, and it will be great to have some time to catch up on life for a couple of weeks. These past few weeks have been terribly busy and the next two will be even more so! All of these projects and final exams and tests came in so suddenly, and will be gone just as quickly I hope.

This past week, we were able to spend a lot of class time working on our final project for ICT. I was glad to have this class time to work with my partner and to discuss and become even closer to finishing it!

In some cases, group work can be a pain. Sometimes you are set up with people that do not share the same interests as you do, or they want to take the project in a different way. Being able to find a time where all group members can meet is also very challenging with each person's schedule being different but all being just as busy. There can also be issues with students not doing an equal share of the work and giving one student the majority of the project to do. (I have been here before and it is not a good position to be in) This can be one of the main frustrations with group projects.

This project however, I am lucky to work with a friend and roommate, so this makes it easy to meet up and go over what we need to work on, or what needs to get finished. We are both pretty excited about our project, and think that the class will enjoy it (given past conversations that we have heard throughout the semester).

Working with people can have its benefits too-- if one person does not understand the project or in this case, the technology, then the other can help them, or both can research it to find out how everything should look and work. Working with others can be fun too, and can help you to meet new people or students in your class that you may not have previously talked to.

I think that as a future music educator, I will take both advantages and disadvantages from group work, and put them towards my decision making on whether or not my class will participate in it, and if they do- how often.

ST- Take 1

Seeing as the rest of our ICT class has just recently finished their first round of student teaching, I thought that I would reflect upon my first student teaching, which happened last year in May.

Because I am in music education, there was not a lot of technology around. We did have a couple of computers, but they were rarely used because most of the time we were rehearsing or out in the community performing. We did have a few different types of technology though. This included:

• amplifiers
• sound boards
• microphones
• a smart board
• a projecter
• a recorder
• keyboards
• and a small computer lab

The smart board that was in our classroom was rarely used, except for when we needed a blank space to project upon. I had never previously experienced working with smart boards for an extended amount of time, and did not have much of a use for it with the subjects I was teaching. 

One thing that I did find interesting however was a recording tech class that I sat in on. Our computer lab contained about 10 Mac computers and each student had their own log in password. They used this class to put sound effects to silent cartoons, and took movie trailers and cut parts and created their own. I thought this was really interesting and was glad that some students got this opportunity to create something using a technology that was really cool. They also used Garage Band to create their own music using generic guitar sounds, vocal sounds, brass, etc. It was good to be involved in this class because I actually got to learn a lot of stuff about this technology that I hadn't previously known. I also appreciated having time to spend playing with Mac computers, as I have never had any. This was a useful skill to learn, especially since the school I student taught in.

Tell me something....

So I wasn't sure how I felt about posting my picture on the internet. I still don't know if I am entirely comfortable with it, so that's why when we were asked to do this project in our ICT class while a guest speaker was with us earlier last week. He had asked us first to tell him something that we were once told- something that stuck with us, and something that we remembered well (that affected us in some way). Each person thought of something, and then the guest speaker walked around the room recording our thoughts. When everyone had said their sentence, he put it all together in a program called Audacity, which is used to put together sound files and cut parts, slow them down or add music to them, among other things. In the end, it was quite powerful-- hearing everyone in our class tell something that had been very personal to them. And if you add a slow acoustic guitar song behind it, it is really quite impressive.

Later on in the presentation, we were asked to take a "selfie", and then put our favourite educational quote on it. Because I wasn't comfortable with having my picture on the internet, I found a creative commons picture of a pair of shoes, and then placed the quote:

         "You can never be too overdressed or overeducated." --Oscar Wilde

I would love to upload it here! But...it seems that I can't. Hmm. For some reason it won't let me upload it. Why am I always having these problems??? I swear that I know how to work a computer.

Powerpoint Faux-Pas

This past week we spent a day or two on Powerpoint and the problems that it can cause for students, simply because they don't know how their slides can go wrong if they choose the wrong colour or picture. 

The in-class activity we participated in class would be a very good thing to do with a middle school class, who would just be starting with making their own Powerpoints. We were split into pairs and given a common problem that a lot of people encounter when making powerpoints. For example: The colours of the text are hard to see, or difficult to read due to the text, or there were too many gadgets and slideshow effects. We all then created a couple of slides showing the problem, and had the rest of the class try and guess what the powerpoint problem was. 

I think that this is an effective way of showing students how to create effective and easy to read powerpoints. 

I won't be blogging consistently over the coming weeks, but sometime next month there will be more for sure! Until then...

Animation..animato...animoto..photomoto!

So this week we were introduced to Animoto. And it was kind of cool!

http://animoto.com/play/xh3EdoaRHUyy1aLbhRvZQA

The above link is the video i recently created using Animoto. I enjoyed all of the themes and found it very easy to use. One of the drawbacks that it has though is that with the free account, you can only created very short videos, only thirty seconds each.

This is still useful though! I've seen way too many classroom teachers abuse PowerPoint and this new tool (Animoto) is a good, albeit short, but still a good substitute that can help students organize their pictures, create slideshows, and perhaps even presentations.

Being a music student, music is one of the main features that I focused on while making this video. There were many options given on the website, but I did not recognize any of them. I still managed to find a track that suited my presentation and sounded nice at the same time. Choosing music from the animoto website also helps with copyright infringement-- if you use their music, it has already been licensed for this purpose! If a student chooses to add a track that is not from the website, you may have to worry about these kinds of things. So encourage them to pick from the given list!

All in all it was a good week. The website is going well but it has much more work to be done on it!