music technology

Technology: Music Ed Apps

The Best Music Apps for Educators 

These are exciting times for music educators. Desktop computers and laptop notebooks have slowly changed our modes of creating, teaching, and assessing music. But tablets and smartphones have ramped up the music experience faster and farther than we could have imagined. The iPad and table computers are destined to change the way we teach and interact with students and technology. Today’s touchscreen sensitivity, which eliminates the need for a mouse, has also changed the way we work. This is important because it is gives us a more tactile surface which directly influences how we interface with data and music.

Technology: YouTube

Using YouTube in the Music Classroom

YouTube is among the most popular and ubiquitous sites on the Internet. According to the site’s own statistics, more than one billion unique visitors use YouTube each month, and it reaches more adults than any single cable network. Almost half of the traffic on YouTube can be accounted for through mobile devices such as phones and tablets. It is a powerful tool for storing video, communicating, marketing and promoting music, and tracking social trends in media. YouTube use in the classroom has recently been shown to positively influence several types of educational engagement.

Technology: Digital Audio Workstations

Web-based apps for the music classroom

In a previous edition of SBO, Dr. Jay Dorfman wrote about the growth of cloud-based computing and its impact on education. This model of computing leverages access to networks (both local and internet) for most, if not all, activities that a user may do on his or her computer. Very little is actually stored on the user’s computer. Instead, applications and documents are accessed from remote servers. The netbooks (i.e. Google Chrome) are a good example of this new trend. It’s almost as if we’ve come full circle from the early 1970s when mainframe computers handled tasks sent from “terminals,” primitive keyboard and printer devices. Of course, today we have media-rich experiences with images, audio, and video at our beck and call, which can be invaluable resources for the music classroom. 

UpClose: Richard McCready

A Glimpse into the Future of Music Education

As technology shifts the world around us, long-accepted paradigms about how we communicate, learn, and teach are rapidly evolving. Richard McCready of Clarksville, Maryland’s River Hill High School, recognizes this seismic shift in the educational landscape, and has been at the forefront of implementing a new reality. Recently named the Technology Institute for Music Education (TI:ME) 2013 “Teacher of the Year,” McCready uses technology to inspire and engage students in music making and composition using an assessable, task-based methodology.

“What we have in our whole assessment model and our whole curriculum model throughout schools is one based on mathematics: it follows a sequential order,” says McCready. “That certainly is an okay approach. However, kids today are learning in a totally different way.” McCready is referring to a new style of learning that he describes as being more like a spider web than a straight line. He continues, “The whole approach through creativity allows us to go into learning skills in a way that is not so linear. We don’t say, ‘We need to learn this skill and then we’ll go to the next one.’ What we do is we gradually impart skills as the students need them.”

Karen Garrett: Plugging Music Technology into the Schools