As far as this activity being "authentic collaborative,"
it was valuable to see what others in my field found. I am sure the first
things we all wrote down were those things we already knew about. But then, we
had to go searching for some technologies we did not know of. I found a lot of
interesting things along the way and found some new technologies I had never
heard of. I even learned a bit about some technologies I have heard of, but
have no experience or exposure to.
While
this spreadsheet could be useful in the future, I feel that there are some
things on it that I did not consider technology. For example, several items
were of websites where music educators order music and other supplies from
often. I was trying to decide if this counted as technology: it is on the
internet and makes our lives easier to order things for our students, but on
the other hand, paper catalogs existed for this. So it is for convenience, not necessity.
There
are other items, music composition softwares, and prototypes of technology that
offer amazing opportunities in the classroom for the present and the future.
Composition is being pushed in music classrooms now more than ever, and while
paper and pen or improvisation have their places, software such as Finale
allows students to write and hear their composition played back. Someday soon,
our students will be able to conduct a virtual orchestra in a program run with
something like the Wii remote. Keeping in mind we may be teaching in an urban
setting one day, the digital tuners and metronomes that are online for free are
a fantastic resource. Although musicians should own them, we must keep in mind
our students may not have the money.
I think that overall, this group assignment went really well within our group. I also figured going into it that other people would have similar technologies and that i'd have to research others for it because we all would have a lot of the same ones to put on the list if otherwise. I also agree with you on what you would consider to be a technology on our spread sheet, some of the stuff I didn't feel was a technology too like the word docs, online music order sites and such but overall it was good and we had a good mix of different things on there that would be considered technologies.
ReplyDeleteMegan, can you elaborate a little bit more on what made the activity "authentic collaboration"?
ReplyDeleteI think the cloud composing softwares like "NoteFlight" will democratize and free up the budgets of music programs once they become more advanced. Just like the free metronomes and tuners out there now, the ability to compose online without even buying a program and then saving your work to a cloud is going to have serious impact on the music education world eventually. That is, as long as it isn't squashed out of existence by the bigger companies (Finale, Sibelius -- which is Avid which basically owns everything).
ReplyDelete