Module #5 Reflection

This is the fifth of our several weekly blogs during the course of the class “Technology Assisted Music Learning”. The following paragraphs will reflect on what I learned during Module 5 of the class. I am looking forward being further educated more on technology in music and music education as we progress through the last few weeks of this class!

Auralia is an online ear training program that is geared for students from Elementary School through High School. For this week's project, I put together a review of this program. I downloaded the trial software for my review. I found it easy to learn and user friendly during my navigation through the program. The audio examples in many of the exercises are excellent as well. It is only $99 for a student subscription which isn't too bad for a family to purchase. You may use the program both on a home and school computer. I would use this program with my students if we were working on ear training and dictation in a Music Theory class. I gave this program an excellent rating in my review! Please check out the Auralia website: https://www.musicfirst.com/auralia-first 

Personal Learning Network or PLN, is where a student uses several internet resources and social media to become better educated. For our class, it is designed to help us become more educated not only in technology but music education in general. For the fifth week of our class, we continued to contribute and grow our PLN. We also continued using several internet resources such as Feedly, Twitter and we continued to contribute to the Digital Musicking Group on Google. During this fifth week of our class, I am gaining a greater understanding of the PLN and how it works. This week, we also added Diigo (www.Diigo.com) to our PLN. It is a resource in which we can share different articles on music, education and technology. I posted 10 different resources to my Diigo page and shared them on the Diigo Digital Musicking Group for my classmates to review. Here is the link to my Diigo page: www.Diigo.com/user/MLioneEHSBand

During the week of Module 5, we had to read parts of  Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 from Dr. Bauer’s book “Music Learning Today.” During Chapter2, Dr. Bauer talked about several technology aspects such as graphics, video, instructional software, tutorials and practice. These are all aspects that I have seen in the programs we have worked with in this class during the first five weeks. I found it insightful when Dr. Bauer said in Chapter 2 about video, " Many videos are available online that can be useful for music learning. From tutorials to explain anything from the beginning techniques of playing an instrument to famous performances of famous musicians, to examples of music practices all over the world, video sharing can be a tremendous benefit to students and teachers". I relate to what Dr. Bauer is saying here because we recently in my High School band class, we watched the CNN documentary on the British invasion of the 1960's. I think my students got a better understanding of the music and musicians of that time period in music history rather than simply reading about it out of a book.