Using the Yamaha Harmony Director Keyboard

I found this part of the blog assignment each week to be the toughest part of the assignment. I quickly found that the music ed blogs I could find, did not update them regularly, therefore I was forced to find other resources, that were honestly more helpful! And as Professor Brown stated in our second synchronous class meeting, the point of this assignment was to teach us how to find things that will help us implement new technologies in our classrooms. For the final week I found one of the most fun blog posts yet! It was the third video in a three part series for Jazz Appreciation Month.  In this blog/video members of Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band share tips on what to do when your live performance take an unexpected turn.  This was very informative for my students a lot of fun! Anytime you can listen to professional musicians play and then talk about their playing, your students have an opportunity to learn things they could never learn from me.  The tips and...

In my final week of the semester I reflect on how this blog assignment has held me accountable to not only use this new technology in my classroom, it has increased my students learning exponentially.  I have obtained the ability to demonstrate intervals that are out-of-tune, help students recognize the beats of interference, and adjust the notes individually to make the interval perfectly in tune, and to model perfectly adjusted chords. Finally, I would like to share that learning to better teach intonation has been very enjoyable for me. My own listening skills and the performance skills of my ensembles have improved noticeably in the past couple of months. Music education students are beginning to learn this information in college, becoming comfortable using the tools available in a more efficient way. It is exciting to see that, with better information and improved instruction, we can help our students master these skills, further improving the performance of our ensembles a...

I found out about an app iDoceo this week. It's used to organize seating charts, random name chooser, assessments, and more. iDoceo an iOS app that needs no internet access to use. You can set it up by having class rosters emailed to you, opening the email with the iPad you will use for iDoceo, tell iDoceo to create a class from the list, and then begin creating tabs within the app. Those tabs involve charts, assessments in the form of video and audio, attendance charts, behavior notes, and more. It keeps everything digitally organized. You can backup everything with google drive, dropbox, and other cloud-based storage services. Though the app is on the pricier end, once you learn how to use it, you will be using it often to organize numerous charts and assessments. iDoceo has some of the best tutorials found on their website.  Because I don't always have access to the internet when traveling with the marching band and we do not have an ipad with cellular service, this app ...