secondary general music
Guideposts for Enjoying New Technology in the Classroom
Eli Grover, WMEA State Chair, Secondary General Music
As students have more and more access to musical tools in and out of the classroom, I have had such a fun time learning and exploring with them. Easy, free, fast, accessible mu-
sic generation wasn’t even a possibility in my first years of teaching, and now 11 years in, it has taken many forms. There is no perfect recipe for how technologies should be used in the classroom, but I have used the following guideposts to enjoy incorpo- rating music tech in the classroom along the way. Throughout and at the end, I’ll give examples that mostly use Time-Unit- Box-System (TUBS) type applications, such as Chrome Music Lab Songmaker or Beepbox.
Playful Exploration Beginnings
With every unit and every instrument, students are going to find the silly sounds and how to max out/hack a program. Let
them! I find this akin to a trombone player making race-car noises, drummers play- ing “bah-dum—crash,” or anyone trying to play “the loudest note” or “the high- est note.” Students naturally want to see what happens when you fill every box in Songmaker or how to turn the tempo up to maximum in
drumbit.app (you can crash your Chromebook if you do it too fast… what a way to avoid turning in your work!). Kindergartners want to write their name in the program, and hey – middle schoolers want to write their name or something else, too. After setting some basic expectations to match school appropriate volume and content, one way for the exploration phase to have a bit of accountability on the first day of individual access to an app is to set up a “Gallery Walk” where students explore and create something on their own. Give limited requirements but also a limited time, and when prompted students travel through the room seeing the experi- ments others have found. Get the students teaching each other the funny stuff, then they may work together when you need them to do the real assignment! Also start
talking about the extremes and the silly things using your traditional and non- traditional vocabulary and hint at where you can take the program use.
Start Getting Serious – Draw Attention to Time
On a piece of sheet music or when reading a book, students are taught the path to take to start in the upper left and read each line left to right. I have always found teaching students to navigate “through time” within an app to be highly valuable so students know how to get the shapes and durations they want into the right form. Demonstrat- ing adding notes while the program is playing, often with lights that move left to right, gets the students to see how the clicked-on boxes are flowing through time. How do you get beyond the first box? There is a second TUBS page/tile (
drumbit.app, Beepbox); scroll left or right to access the next measure or make your song longer by adding bars (Songmaker). In Groove- Pizza there are, you guessed it, pizzas! If using scroll-down piano or boomwhacker
Wisconsin Foundation for School Music President: Steve Plank, Principal,
Wauwatosa East High School President-Elect:
Steve Michaels, Superintendent, Westby Area School District
Past President:
Rich Appel, Superintendent, School District of Horicon
Treasurer: Bernie Fiedler, CFP, Whitewater 20
Board of Trustees: Gregg Butler, Retired, Eau Claire, County Off Campus High School
Jim Boebel, Superintendent, Platteville Mark Hoernke, Principal, Poynette High School
Angie Houston, Principal, Howards Grove Middle School
Steve Michaels, Superintendent, Westby Area School District
Kevin Moore, Principal, Adams-Friendship High School
Dan Hopkins, Principal, Cumberland High School April 2024
Members at Large: Stephanie Elkins, Program Director, Wisconsin Public Radio
Sarah Jerome, Retired, Arlington Heights School District
Staff:
Laurie Fellenz, Executive Director,
lfellenz@wsmamusic.org
Kerrie Brey, Finance Manager,
breykl@wsmamusic.org
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