Responding to Music

This week I focused I some differing types of software that exist in the music education world.  The program that caught my attention almost immediately was Music Ace.  This program I got familiar with when my mother used it for her piano studio when I was growing up.  This programs greatest feature in my opinion was the composition function.  You could write your own songs in a very user friendly way.  This program had the ability to write single melody lines as well as chords.  This is a great way for students to begin the composition process within the daunting technology hurdles of programs like Finale and Sibelius.  I appreciated the trip down memory lane and had a great time playing with this program again.

I also spent some wandering around Diigo. Being apart of this community has already yielded some fantastic resources.  Through this and the RSS function and the inter connectivity between Google+ and Twitter, I was able to find some terrific new resources as well as some terrific ways to utilize apps that I already have.  The most significant was 14 uses for IPad apps in the music classroom.  The ideas presented for using GarageBand were the best part if this experience.  I have to say that after this week I have been reinvigorated with my use of technology in the classroom.  At some point I felt that I was getting technology overload.  I was feeling that there were so many ideas I didn't even know where to start.  But there were/are some great ideas that I found that helped me get started.

We learned about different ways that students can respond to music in the classroom.  Technology has been a saving grace with this kind of standard.  I have found that using technology has greatly enriched my students responses to music.  Being able to play some of the greats for my students has been a huge advantage, and now that we have access to YouTube and Spotify and iTunes, the possibilities have become endless.  Students are now responding to music everyday and are being exposed to many different styles and genres of music.