iBook 2: How Does this Affect The Music Teacher?
By janice | January 23, 2012
“There is no reason today to assume that our kids have to use the same tools they did back in 1950 – Infact to do so is to prepare them for a world that has already past”
This was a quote taken from some of the marketing video streamed last week, in Apple’s latest presentation in a bid to help teachers face the challenges of education today. In the launch Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller talked about how they can help in the area of student engagement in the classroom and he ran a short video stating some of the challenges that teachers face in the classroom. Here are some of the teacher quotes from the video shown:
“ Education is in the Dark Ages- No fundamental changes have occurred in 150 years”
“ It’s very difficult to be a teacher and to be a student when resources are not available; when class sizes are 40+ and buildings are in disrepair”
“ Students have difficulty with reading writing and arithmetic at the high school level”
“ There have been studies of classroom walk -through throughout the country and (generally) there are very low levels of student engagement and kids are just bored!”
“You can’t expect them to go from a world at home where they’ve got a laptop or a smartphone in their pocket, or a computer on their desk and come into school and have all that disappear”
“Unfortunately not all classrooms have all the technology or even textbooks they need to succeed”
“Teachers get very discouraged when their students don’t succeed and graduate knowing that their teachers have failed them or the system has failed them”
“The ability to engage a student is the key to being a good teacher”
“Using outdated materials such as textbooks make the job (of teaching) much more difficult”
“Textbooks are usually very expensive- they’re usually $50-$100 each, so they’re adopted for 4-5 years and then you’re usually stuck with them”
“Textbooks are usually heavy and if you have three or four of them in a backpack, they’re a lot of weight- so some students will quit bringing them to school”
Apple’s answer to the challenge of promoting more student engagement in the classroom is a new iPad application called iBooks 2 . I’ve put this short guide together to explain it in a “nutshell” and to look at some thoughts about it’s use – especially in the music classroom.
What is iBook 2?
As Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller explained in Thursday’s launch, textbooks are outdated – They are often old, dogeared, expensive to buy, students don’t feel they can highlight them, they are heavy and these days the information inside often dates before the book has been released from the publishing house. Since The iPad has fast become every teenager’s number one wish list item, using an iPad to encourage reading text books in the classroom is the future of learning.
All any iPad user needs to do is download iBook 2, which is a free application to their iPad. This application enables any user to browse though textbooks of different categories and add them to their bookshelf. In the classroom, a teacher would suggest a textbook for each student to use and each student would download the book for a cost of around $15, which is a very competitive price compared to any traditional text book publisher.
Thursday’s onstage presentation of iBooks 2 outlined some exciting features which included:
- An opening page movie- to get the reader excited and motivated for their learning ahead
- Interactive Images- you can easily enlarge the images shown in the book and you can even interact with the images, by writing labels, playing simple games and categorising them in the right order
- Unlike traditional textbooks there is no crease in the centre- so this makes for an easier read
- Each student can easily highlight relevant notes in the textbook and write a comment about the notes- then this information is displayed together on a separate page for easy study later on
- Relevant notes can be automatically made into learning flashcards
- Navigating new unknown words is easy- simple press the word in question and you’ll go to the glossary section at the end of the book.
- The textbook can incorporate an end of chapter revision quiz- where students are actively revising the content of the book as they progress through it
Take a look at this short YouTube Video put out by Apple which brilliantly outlines it’s use and need:
How Could it Be Used in the Music Classroom?
This seems like a great new system to encourage learning and technology with junior – upper high school students. What do you think? What would you be looking for in a Music textbook for this age group? Would your students afford an iPad each to use? Could you imagine using an interactive textbook with your classes? Let us know what you’re thinking on this “hot’ topic as any new advancements in technology are always great reasons to network with the wider teaching community.
Other Helpful Articles:
Live Streaming of the Apple Announcement
iBooks 2: A Guide to The Free Textbook App
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Topics: Uncategorized
Introducing Percussion to Primary School Children
By janice | January 18, 2012
The value of movement in connection with learning is unparalleled in our elementary and primary classrooms. In cultures around the world, exploration through percussion is a natural way of connecting children to the group and developing their motor responses. Movement through music, furthermore, helps stimulate the brain and integrate the right and left hemispheres
After extensive observations of how young children learn about the world by interacting with objects in their environment, physician and educator Maria Montessori once wrote,
“Not only are thought and action two parts of the same occurrence, but it is through movement that the higher life expresses itself.”
Since the action of drumming comes easily to children, exploring percussion is a way to open the door to a broader appreciation of music and achieving the benefits that music has to offer.
Here are some ways that you can introduce percussion instruments and percussive music to your students. After these starter activities, you may want to devote some time with your classes to discuss what kind of sounds were heard, what is rhythm, and how a song can be made with beats:
Play the Room – Taking caution not to strike anything that is fragile, allow children to explore the room with drumsticks. Tap the floor, tables, chairs, desks, doorknobs, and shelves. For discussion, ask what makes a loud or soft sound, and what object kept the longest sound. Have children sit in pairs, taking turns “playing the floor” and listening, to help make the connection between vibration and sound.
Create Copycat Rhythms – Clap a pattern and have students echo-clap back to you. Encourage other children to be the leader for the group “conversation.” Copycat rhythms can be created by stomping feet, jumping, or with drums or shakers in the circle. Connect rhythm to what children know by singing familiar nursery rhymes and clapping to the beat.
Play the Jungle Beat – Start with pictures of different jungle animals and talk about what kind of sound characterizes that animal. With stomping feet in hard or soft, slow and fast beats, practice together how an elephant or rhinoceros sounds. How is this different from the sound of a monkey walk, or a tiger stalking its prey?
Use Found Objects – Objects everywhere from the kitchen to the junkyard can be used to make a sound. Ask children to bring something from home that they think makes a good sound (pots and pans, lids for cymbals, graters or scrapers) and have them introduce the sound in the circle. What rattles, clatters, or jingles? Talk about the qualities of the sound, and then conduct the group in an orchestra of stuff!
Introduce Instruments that Children can Easily Play – Instruments such as the xylophone, tambourine, maracas, triangles, glockenspiels and bongo drums are ideal for their ease of play and varying percussive qualities. Allow time for children to explore the qualities of their sounds, or have a set space in class so that children try making their own music with instruments that they choose.
Listen to Great Traditions – The music of Ghana and Nigeria has particularly rich drumming traditions. Listen to recordings from Africa and other cultures to expose children to the masters of percussive rhythms.
Reading about percussion instruments and exposing our students is a first active step to introducing elementary aged children to percussion instrument playing. One way to learn more is by sharing your own ideas and strategies with the wider Fun Music Company community using the comments box below. Be sure to leave your feedback giving details of your favourite strategy for teaching percussion to elementary and primary children so you can network with other teachers and find new ideas and strategies together.
You’ll also find some tips on how to properly play some beginning percussion instruments at our percussion secrets video which is presented by an expert percussionist who makes learning percussion instruments very easy to understand. If you’re looking for something which is a hands on approach to general music percussion with elementary/ lower primary students and you have access to an interactive whiteboard, you can access a ready to go lesson and watch a video at http://www.funmusicco.com/interactive-whiteboard.html. Alternatively, if you would like to have more music percussion ideas for upper primary students, you might also be interested in my article called “Teaching ideas Using STOMP in a general music class” which will give you all kinds of ideas on junk percussion and other percussion instruments that will motivate mid- upper primary students.
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Topics: Classroom Music, lesson ideas, Music Resources for young children, music teacher resources
The Secrets to Creating a Successful Music Theory Curriculum
By janice | January 16, 2012
“Research shows a positive connection between teachers’ preparation in their subject matter and their performance and impact in the classroom” .
I read this recently in a US study about teacher preparation research(1) and I’m sure that it’s no surprise to any of us that the more prepared a teacher is in their specific subject area(s) the more effective they will be as a teacher in the classroom! This statement couldn’t be more true in the area of music education. If a music teacher is knowledgeable about the subject area, is well planned in content and has the flexibility to adapt and change to specific class needs and interests to make it fun and relevant, it is much easier to have better working relationships with students and less behaviour management issues.
I’ve come up with a simple FUN acronym which stands for Foundations, Understanding and Needs to teach the concepts of making an ideal music theory curriculum for the classroom. Each element is necessary in this order in and when one or more of these elements is missing, it just doesn’t equate to the right outcome of FUN with music. Let me explain each element in FUN.
The F stands for Foundation: Since a curriculum starts from ground level and builds up over the year(s) ahead, you’ll need a strong foundation to build upon. However, you can only build if you know what your end point or outcome is. The philosophy for any strong program is to start with the end in mind. From the outset of planning any curriculum, learn to ask yourself powerful questions like what do I want my students to achieve? and What specific grade requirements do they need to know? Once you’ve got this end point in mind, you’ll be able to easily work back to the beginning foundations. Gradually then with the beginning and end points as your starting blocks, you’ll be able to build it up into a term, semester, year or over the period of several years ahead and you’ll find it much easier to know how quickly to move through the knowledge that your students need to know and the order they need to learn it in.
The U stands for Understanding: Music is like learning a second language and sometimes when we’re working with it all the time, this is very easy to forget. As teachers, we need to remember to understand what each student is going through and often in music classes all of our students are at different stages in their learning music. The key to success in Understanding our students is to keep it simple. One new concept at a time, revised in loads of different ways until it’s understood.
The N stands for Needs: All humans have needs and I’ve learnt this step from one of the world’s best peak performance coaches, Anthony Robbins. In his work, he suggests that while we all value some things more than others in life and we may value some things differently to others in a different order, we all have the same fundamental needs that we either subconsciously or consciously meet in order to fulfil our lives. All people have a need for certainty. It may not be their number one need, but we all have the need for it. You can see this all the time in children, if they are not certain they know what’s going to happen next, they often don’t cope very well. But while we all have a need for certainty, the universe also has a sense of humour and gives us a need for uncertainty too. We all love the spontaneous surprises in life (especially the good surprises)- this is uncertainty or sometimes it’s known as variety. There’s even an old saying “Variety is the spice of life” – this is where that comes from. Since all people have needs, it makes sense that our teaching should cater for these and other needs too. While we need to make it clear to our students what we want for them, we should also give them something out of the blue to think about once in a while which is a surprise or is different in some kind of way. An example of how we could do this in music classes could be to play a game which is appropriate to the age and ability level of your students and which revises known concepts.
The concepts that are discussed in this article are aligned with a PDF document called “ Music Theory Curriculum” which we use when working together with teachers to help support putting theoretical concepts into practice. If you are interested to learn more, you will find a video, a curriculum document and resource materials to get you started with your classes at : http://www.funmusicco.com/music-curriculum.
1. Teacher Preparation Research: Current Knowledge, Gaps, and Recommendations
A Research Report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education by the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy in collaboration with Michigan State University
http://depts.washington.edu/ctpmail/PDFs/TeacherPrep-WFFM-02-2001.pdf
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Topics: Classroom Music, lesson ideas, music lesson plans, Music Theory
