Merry Christmas!
Hope you are staying warm this holiday season.
Thanks for reading!
Roger
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Hope you are staying warm this holiday season.
Thanks for reading!
Roger
OK so the concert is over. It is the last day before vacation and you want to work harder than your exhausted kids. How do you fill the day?
How about a little SmartMusic show and tell? I have been looking for a good time to tell kids they should really play back the assignment before turning it in. This was it. The main issues students are having with SmartMusic are mic placement and setting the volume controls. A little show and tell should help that.
We also took a look at the tuners, the other included method books (looking for enrichment opportunities?) changing tempos, trouble shooting the audio drivers, about a million questions and shared experiences with the program. Follow-up is an important part of training. This was an excellent follow-up session at a good time for the kids. It was time well spent.
The kids also had fun watching me try to beat the machine. Who knew playing page 14 could be so entertaining?
We have had our concerts. They went well!
Some SmartMusic realated items came to light.
Older students did a much "cleaner" job on the pieces that were SmartMusic assignments. I believe that having the wrong notes and bad timing put on the screen for you is really helping students raise their level of expectation of themselves. "Was he talking to me?" about the wrong note is quickly settled with SmartMusic. I think all concert pieces are about to become SmartMusic assignments!
The beginner band concert went very well. Some teachers who helped supervise the fifth grade concerts from year to year were noticing the difference between this group and several previous school years. They suspected the tool was helping. This group still has sectional time built into their week, so that observation is helpful in decision making. We will keep using SmartMusic.
Overall, I'm pleased with the help. Wish everyone still had sectionals so we could work on tone, articulation, style and teamwork issues in a smaller setting.
I have been working hard at pulling together a presentation about SmartMusic for the TIES conference next week. I have a laptop full of ideas and I have been filtering them down.
The basic gist of what I am going to say involves the educational soundness of using a program like this in your teaching. There are two themes. There are the James Paul Gee thoughts on video gaming and learning as well as good old Bloom's Taxonomy.
I have to admit this talk could be written by the kids in the practice room hallway. The conversations about SmartMusic assignments give clues as to what they would say: "I had trouble with that too, let me help you..." , "Here's what you are doing wrong..." , "I keep making a mistake right here...".
Are your students analyzing and solving their problems?