Is Power Point Pointless?

So I'm sitting here amidst TONS of boxes, stressing about moving tomorrow and trying to complete my power point presentation. Though I know power point isn't a pointless program, I'm finding it rather difficult to use Fetch to put it on my server and post it as a webpage. Fetch doesn't seem to be working and I'm pulling my hair out! Well, I guess I will just try and keep working with it. I only have a few hours before I need to box up my computer so I will have to work fast! Looking at other people's pages, I haven't seen many presentations completed yet so I don't feel AS bad-though Melanie's is AWESOME! Is anyone else having problems? In any case, I hope everyone is enjoying their summers and staying cool-it was BLASTING hot today wasn't it? Ugh, how gross!

Teens and Technology

Even though I consider myself somewhat of a "young person," I find myself often out-teched by those slightly younger than me. When I was in high school, NO ONE had a cell phone or even a mac computer. Now, it's a necessity in life! As I created my podcasts (something I had never attempted before) I found myself browsing and looking at other podcasts on the internet. I was taken aback at the amount of teens that had created TONS of podcasts of their own music and realized that some day soon, I will be expected to teach kids like these, new aspects of music technology. I now know that I have a lot to learn but honestly, things like PodBean.com and iTunes are making technological processes such as podcasting VERY easy for even people like me to learn! I'm realizing how user-friendly online technology is becoming and how useful it can be in the classroom!

Finishing Touches

Working on this website is exhausting! You know I was thinking the other day, when I took Dr. Gilbert's Tech Tools class over one semester, I found it incredibly challenging (and I learned a lot!). My present classmates are having to squish everything from that course into THREE WEEKS!! I just can't even imagine....I think my head would explode! I guess that's why they call this an "intensive" right? Well I still managed to learn some new things during these three weeks that I hadn't known before: what is a podcast, how to use FETCH, how to save a word doc as a webpage and post it on your website, and most of all, how great it feels to help others work through their HTML hardships. I have to admit that I've genuinely enjoyed watching my classmates' eyes light up as I explained something new to them one-on-one that they hadn't known or a little "tip" to make things easier. I found that I really enjoyed helping them and realized how much I actually know about this stuff! Since our course was compressed into three weeks, our class formed sort of a little family. We could all have welcome conversations with one another-laughing and chatting like old friends. It was indeed something special.

I keep working on the rest of my webpage and it's taking me awhile to fine-tune. I found that I couldn't quite get my resume to post right. There was always something wrong with the alignment at the top of the page. Any suggestions? Next project-create my podcast page and prepare for the presentation tomorrow.....


Working with Kim and Edgar has proven to be incredibly informative and fun! They have so many great ideas and I know a lot more about opera and hip-hop than I did before! I never thought opera and hip-hop had so much in common!

Learning Something New Every Day!

As a teacher, I think it's important to realize that you never stop learning. Yesterday and today I've been working on my group project-presenting similarities and links between opera and hip-hop. I decided to put together a track in Audacity using a hip-hop MP3 ("Rapper's Delight" by RunDMC) and an opera MP3 ("Il Travatore"). I chose to use Audacity because it was a program of which I've had little experience and I wanted to learn more about it. MAN did I learn! I spent 8 hours yesterday working on this track-splicing from both, trying to get the rhythms to match eachother. In any other program, it would have been incredibly easy to establish a loop, getting the rhythms exact and cutting and pasting. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything in Audacity that would allow me to loop an audio clip so I had to do EVERYTHING manually. If I was off by a fraction of a second, my entire track would skip and it would sound awful. Also, whenever I generated more silence on one track, it would add it to all of them-making even more frustration! Though Audacity is good for many things, I would not recommend it for creating samples or splicing. It just takes FOREVER!! My track ended up being OK but I know I could have done better using another program. However, that wasn't the point of this little experiment. I wanted to try something new and experiment with it. I'm proud of myself for getting this far and not giving up!
We were originally going to use this track as something for Kim to dance to during our presentation but we all agreed that it would serve a much better purpose as a soundtrack to an iMovie about opera and hip-hop. Thus a new idea was born and Kim got to work on it! Edgar was ahead of the game putting together his page online and researching information on opera history. He gave us a LOT to work with! During our meeting yesterday, the three of us came up with some GREAT additional ideas that would beef up our project and flex our teacher muscles. I won't disclose it here but it's going to be a LOT of fun!!!

Online Music Teacher Resources

As a new music teacher, I have many butterflies fluttering in my stomach and am constantly looking for support both from online sites and fellow teachers. I've heard that teachers "learn by doing" and that most of what you will learn as a teacher will be from your students in the classroom. As I haven't taught that much yet, I guess I have a ways to go! Well I found some sites that might be useful for other new music teachers who like me, might need a little push in the right direction:

The Music in Schools Today website has job postings, worksheets for classes and even a list of professional associations that you might like to join.
The MENC website has TONS of information ranging from conferences you can sign up for, blogs, info on teaching band/chorus/mariachi/orchestra and ANYTHING else musical you can think of! I found out about a summer conference in upstate NY that I am now planning on attending!
Sometimes funding for music isn't what it should be and music teachers are forced to use their own wallets to bring music into the classroom. FreeScores.com is a GREAT site I use to find free music and is a wonderful resource for any teacher needing some musical freebies. There are over 6,000 pieces of instrumental music on this site for free that range from orchestra to the lute!<-for those of you teaching a Medieval music class! I use this site a lot and hope it helps you as much as it did me!

Literacy through Music

I have begun to do research on how music can be used to develop literacy and came across an amazing article on teaching collaborating in music, literacy and math. You can read about it here. Music in Schools Today or Must collaborated with a local elementary school to create a teaching model revolving around incorporating music into academic teaching-language arts, math, reading. They received a $40,000 grant to do this and MILE (Music Integrated Literacy Enhancement) became immediately implemented into the curriculum.
This program was designed to be keep music education's head above water amongst the staggering budget cuts that the entire nation is experiencing. MuST collaborated with an outside technologies company-CitySpan Technologies to create a database where they could review and organize their research, eventually making it available to outside schools. The MILE website is still under construction but contains a printable brochure on the program.
As a music educator, I would have liked to see MILE in action to observe their teaching strategies but it seems that the program is still in its early stages. However, there is a PowerPoint presentation available for download that better illustrates the program. MILE exposes all children to music at a very young age but using musical games and examples to teach children math, reading, etc and is incredibly important in keeping music education alive.

Composing or Decomposing?

Hmm....So I think I mentioned before that I was assigned a small independent project in which I compose new music for the film Citizen Kane. Right now, it's not the composing that's the problem-it's the technical side! It took us almost three hours to figure out how to "rip" the first chapter of the film from it's DVD using MacTheRipper (didn't work at all-only created non-usable VOB files), and a weird program called Diva which ended up somewhat working. We didn't end up getting the sound on the final rip and it makes me wonder how I'm going to put everything together! Where am I supposed to post this thing when I'm done? I don't have room on my website for it.......ugh.....technology.....

In other news, I am working on the PowerPoint presentation on literacy and am using PowerPoint for the first time. It's really easy! I'm enjoying the process!