Module #6 Reflection Blog

This is the sixth of what will be several weekly blogs during the course of the class “Technology Assisted Music Learning”. The following paragraphs will reflect on what I learned during Module 6 of the class. I am looking forward being further educated more on technology in music and music education as we progress through the last two weeks of this class. Time is flying by!

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 sixth 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 sixth week of our class, I am gaining a greater understanding of the PLN and how it works.  This was my contribution to the Digital Musicking Group for week 6: http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2011/10/learning-to-play-musical-instrument-is.html

During this week, we continued to use www.lynda.com which is a free resource that is open to students in our Masters in Music Education program here at the University of Florida. We are going to be using Lynda and other video resources to help us create our Web Quest projects which will be due in the final week of this class.

During the week of Module 8, we had to read Chapter 7 from Dr. Bauer’s book “Music Learning Today.” During this Chapter, Dr. Bauer talked about several music technology, teaching and composition topics such as Copyright, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and Backward Design to name a few. During our discussion topic, we were assigned to create a top 5 list of what we felt was important from our weekly readings. Here is my top 5:

5. Instructional Logistics- With the increasing amount of technology that is available for schools, do the schools have the facilities or money to purchase this technology and make it accessible?

4. Fair Use- Educators may use copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder under certain conditions, designated in the copyright laws.

3. Public Domain- Instead of being owned by an individual who has exclusive ownership, these works can be used by anyone.

2. Creative Commons- This is a not-for-profit organization that provides free licenses that specify what can and cannot be done with an original work. The licenses are designed to be applicable throughout the world.

1. Copyright- This is a form of protection provided by laws of the United States to the authors of original works or creations. Music Educators must always observe copyright laws.
 

My top 5 list is teacher-centered. It is important that every music teacher be aware of the items that I listed in my top 5 with Copyright Laws being #1. It is very easy in our line of work of photocopying and arranging music to forget that these examples do exist.