Module #7 Reflection Blog

This is the seventh and final post of what was several weekly blogs during the course of the class “Technology Assisted Music Learning”. The following paragraphs will reflect on what I learned during Module 7 of the class. I am looking forward to reflecting on technology in music and music education as we progress through the last week of this class. It's almost the end!  

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 seventh 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 seventh 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 7:  http://techinmusiced.wordpress.com/category/ipad-apps/ 

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. We also used several tutorial videos from Lynda.com to help us with our administrative project. We had to create on Google a calendar, newsletter and short slide show. These are resources we could use when administering activities in our department. The tutorial videos were a great help and I could not have completed the project without them!

During the week of Module 7, we had to read pages from  Chapters 6 and 8 from Dr. Bauer’s book “Music Learning Today.” During these readings, Dr. Bauer talked about ways in which technology can facilitate musical assessment and professional productivity in our classrooms. We had to discuss this topic in our weekly discussion assignment. I use technology both in a personal and professional manner. I frequently use email to communicate to parents and colleagues as well as a school fusion page on our school website to post announcements and assignments. I have even started to use Twitter to communicate to students and parents as well. This fall, I will begin to use EdModo which is a school approved program where students can receive notifications about rehearsals. Once a student signs up, they will get a text message alert on their phone if I post about a rehearsal change or cancellation.

As for using technology for assessment in my classroom, we use it for our critiques of concerts. After a concert, we watch the video and the students fill out a rubric based upon what they felt was good or not so good both for their own performance as well as the group.