Content of the Course: A Few of My Favourite Things: Part One

This blog entry will give a brief analysis of each application that has been covered during the ICT module of our teacher training course. In Part One we will discuss Hot Potatoes, Worlde, PowerPoint and Prezie. I will evaluate the extent to which these software can be useful to music teachers and learners in the twenty-first century.

First up is Hot Potatoes! Unfortunately this does not involve actual potatoes! This software allows the user to create six different quiz-based tasks. In class we focused upon creating crossword puzzles. Apart from being a bit ‘clunky’, it’s an easy piece of software to use for teachers and ideal for a lesson starter or plenary. On the downside however, a crossword task may be a little easy for an ALevel music class. A better exercise might be to give the learners a word and to ask them to give an accurate definition. Which leads nicely onto the next piece of software, Wordle.

Wordle is brilliant for exam revision! Essentially it allows the user to create a kind of word collage using a variety of colours and designs. For teachers, it could be used to test the student’s knowledge of specific terminology. For example in music, there is a whole list of words that examiners expect them to know such as ‘pizzicatto, andante, fortissimo,’ amongst hundreds of others. The teacher could ask the learners to pick a word and provide a definition. For even more choice in design, shape and colour, my colleague (Claire Gore) suggested using a more advanced version called Tagxedo. Similar to Hot Potatoes, this would probably fill approximately five minutes of a music lesson at the beginning or end.
 

We were also taught the amazing possibilities of presentation applications such as PowerPoint and Prezie. As Caroline Usei reminded us today, younger learners prefer to take on manageable chunks of information that they can piece together at the end. However, mature students are able to see the bigger picture straight away and they enjoy dissecting the smaller parts which make up the whole. Prezie is a good alternative to PowerPoint as it allows the learner to view the bigger picture at the beginning and moves from bubble to bubble with further detail of each concept.

One disadvantage to programs such as PowerPoint is that they provide a very linear form of teaching. The progression of the discussion is dictated by the prescriptive order of the slides and their content. This leaves little room for class-directed study. Occasionally when teaching older learners it may be necessary to go ‘off topic’ slightly to address other valid points that the learners have raised. As teachers we need to allow for these moments when our lesson takes a positive side-track particularly if the learners have instigated this as it improves their self-learning and discovery.

I decided to utilize Prezie and PowerPoint as an introduction to Beethoven. It could be argued that PowerPoint is more useful for teaching music as it is easier to include hyperlinks or youtube clips that can be accessed directly during the presentation. However there is something 'fresh' and new that I like about Prezie. I particularly enjoy how it visually illustrates how one big concept is made up of lots of smaller concepts or chapters.

 
 

 

Microsoft Office, 

Artificial Intelligence?

 Word

Microsoft Word is a fantastic piece of software for teaching. The features are endless. It allows you to create music booklets, programmes and tickets for concerts. I have used it to create work schedules, calendars with deadlines for my students or simply to make a bullet point list of things to do. You can highlight, colour code and ‘justify’ your text. There are 'track changes' which is a feature that allows the teacher and student to have a conversation in the margins when a piece of work is being marked.
 
With Word, you don’t even have to learn how to spell! Word highlights any faults and corrects them automatically. It even has the ability to create a bibliography without you having do go and to all the fiddly bits! Word made my two degrees a whole lot easier. Its' like my best friend.

Wow sounds fantastic right? However, even though Word is an effective program, we must be aware that it also has the power to limit our personal and academic growth.

What will happen when you stand up in front of thirty teenagers and begin to write terminology on the board without use of spell checker? What will you say when your students correct your spelling? What will you do when your students ask you how to reference correctly? Are you going to just tell them to put it into Word? Are we creating a whole generation of people who are hiding behind a persona of artificial intelligence?

Personally, my spelling is dreadful. When I told my MA tutor about this she commented that she had never noticed. Thus I myself have created this academic persona which is not particularly representative of my true abilities.

What I have come to learn is that this program is extremely useful but there is a danger that we can become too reliant upon these technologies. For example, when Word highlights a spelling error, most users will simply select one of the suggested words from a dropdown list rather than trying to come up with the correct spelling themselves.

During interviews, or classroom teaching we have to learn to cope without these mechanisms in place. Microsoft Office thus is an aid to teachers in the short term but seems to have little effect upon our intelligence in the long term.

Excel

Excel is not particularly designed for music teaching purposes, however it is used daily in the teaching profession. Institutions and colleges require a constant update of predicted grades and electronic registers for records and safety purposes.

One of the downsides is that entering data into a computer leaves much room for human error. To remedy this, many teachers take a paper register first and then enter this data, at a later date, into the spreadsheet.

Similar to Word, the program isn't without its faults and we must ensure that we use these technologies only when necessary. When used efficiently, these programs can be highly useful to the teaching profession. However they are not essential elements when teaching a music lesson.


As Malala Yousafzai reminds us, 

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world”.

Pen and paper can change your life.
Let it.