Application to Diverse Populations
One of the biggest questions I have heard from my friends who are student-teaching this semester is "How do I differentiate in the music classroom?" That's a very good question, that has many great answers. Whether one is working with exceptional individuals or ESL students, there are indeed ways to differentiate in the music classroom with ease. Sure, music educators' literature and content is very different from those of Biology or Math teachers, but there are still ways to differentiate.
In Chad Chriswell's blog, Music Ed Magic, he talks of using a lot of technology in the music classroom. If one is at a school that is fortunate to have iPads available for the classroom, there is an app called Singing Fingers. It allows the student to draw a picture with their finger as it records the sounds of the classroom around them. This is great for elementary ESL students. As the student retraces the lines, it replays the recordings back to them. This is great to get the students to feel more comfortable vocally and with the language around them.
It's nice that a lot of blogs offer recordings that cannot be found on YouTube. These recordings become resources for all of one's students. For ESL students, it becomes a great resource for them to listen to and model. For exceptional learners, they may need extra material to reference in order to grasp the idea. It they cannot quite get the rhythm of a certain song, these blogs allow them to listen to the recordings of it as much as they would like. Some choral music is not easy to find on YouTube or iTunes, so these blogs are great for finding models for one's students to listen to. A good example is The UAB Choir Blog.
Storybird
I never used Storybird until this semester. It was fairly easy to navigate: the themes were laid out clearly, and the artwork was grouped nicely. However, I felt like I was locked into a certain range of creativity because there was only a certain amount of pictures in each theme. On the other hand, it also gave me guidelines that forced me to not be too wordy or sporadic in my story telling. There were a few glitches with some of my slides, but other than that, it was easy to manipulate. I was lucky enough to have no trouble at all embedding it into my blog; the post and story works without any glitches
I think Storybird is great for the elementary classroom. It adds an element of surprise to lessons and stretches across content areas. For instance, my story, Mia Saves Obbleway, not only adds to a lesson that could involve the introduction of non-Western music and non-Western instruments, but it also talks about a different culture. Students need to see how fortunate they are to have a wide variety of opportunities in the United States. My Storybird not only aids in my content area lesson, but it also reaches to the Social Studies content area. Also, students have many different learning styles. Half of one's class may understand a certain lesson through explanation, but the other may need to see tangible evidence. Storybirds aids in this.
New Technology
Since my last blog, my eyes have truly been opened to many aspects of technology. I have now successfully worked with technology, such as Digital Story, Storybird, Google Sites and Glogster. I am blown away by the capabilities of these programs. Digital Story was extremely easy to navigate, and it was very clear. I can use this to elaborate on anything that I teach. For instance, I could use it to explain correct and incorrect singing posture and technique. I also feel that my students could use this easily if I were to give them an assignment using Digital Story. My other favorite out of these newly discovered programs is Glogster. I used this program in another education class this semester. I think its great to summarize a lesson or to tell a brief biography. I could easily use Glogster to create a brief biography of a composer for my students without getting bogged down with too much boring detail.
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