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.