Audacity

Learning the audacity program has been wonderfully helpful, and I think will prove a good resource for me as a future teacher. Being able to manipulate sounds is a wonderful tool for a teacher of a student. Editing music can be useful in many ways, include performance or classroom examples. Having students learn to use audacity could also be a great way to introduce the manipulation of sounds, rhythms, pitches, etc. The fact that it's free to download means it is accessible to all teacher, and accessible for students who have access to a computer lab in their schools.

Technical Resources

For my third post, I would like to report on how valuable I find this course to educators. Unfortunately, in my career as a student, like many other students, I have experienced some valuable courses and some terribly useless ones. However, I believe the skills we are learning in this class are of tremendous value. The things we have learned, such as HTML, audacity, and windows movie maker, can only help us create multi-modal presentation techniques to help us differentiate instruction. This is of wonderful use when catering to different learning styles (or multiple intelligences as introduced by Howard Gardner). As useful as it is, however, I do think that there is so much more to be learned! Ideally, there should be separate technical classes for each disciple (music/theatre/dance education). You could spend years just learning technical resources for music education alone. For example, Garage Band and finale are both wonderful tools for music educators, not only for us to use in teaching, but also to teach our students how to use. Garage Band for instance allows students to compose their own songs with the click of a button! If only we had time to learn such wonderful programs, I think it would be really beneficial!

Tech Resources Group Project

This was actually supposed to be last weeks post...sorry about that. I am really excited to be working in the purple group for our final project. I think we have some good ideas. We have titled our project "Sun and Moon: An adaptation of a Korean folk tale." We thought it would be a wonderful idea to incorporate all aspects of the performing arts in an educational presentation, and what better way to do that than in a Korean folk tale? We decided we could incorporate theatre ed. in a wonderful story telling movie. We hope to incorporate many different versions of the story to create a multi-cultural adaptation. This will include music from around the world, including a Korean piece, with similar (or close) messages. We also hope to incorporate movement into our presentation as well. We are clearly still in the beginning stages, but I look forward to the outcome of our creative ideas.