Halfway through day one, even though I’d registered for all my sessions beforehand, I was still changing my mind and trying to decide which ones to attend. There were so many fantastic seminars and hands-on lessons that it was impossible to get to even a quarter of the ones I would have liked to see. By the end of that first day, I felt like my brain needed its own personal iCloud hovering just beside it, so I had room to store everything that I was learning without the danger of my head exploding.

I was especially excited about this conference because, just the week before, I splurged and bought myself a new iPad 4. Initially I had been suffering from an ever-so-slight case of “buyer’s remorse”, but mtec2013 put paid to all my misgivings and I had lots of fun, starting with Antony Hubmayer’s iPad band which I attended on the first day.

My main personal goal this time around was to get my head around PA systems and sound mixers. I’ve moved to a new school where they have a VET music program and the other music teacher used to own a recording studio, so a very strong music program has been established with the use of these technologies. They represent a side of music which I have always struggled with. I had a number of opportunities to get my head around the basics, and now it’s all finally starting to “click”. (Thanks Keith!)

Some of the sessions

Dr James Frankel showed us a range of resources which are available in”the Cloud”, like noteflight, Charanga, and Soundation, to name a very few. I did a bit of cloud-based work last year, mainly with my maths class, although nowhere near to the extent demonstrated by Jim Frankel and others (notably Samuel Wright, whose work with iBooks blew my mind. Go check his website: he’s very generous and makes his work available for free).

“The Cloud” was one of the constant themes of this conference. Practically every session I attended referred to it in some way. I was using it plenty myself on my new iPad. My apps of choice were Evernote, Dropbox and Notability. I loved how I could upload all the conference notes to the Cloud, download them onto my iPad, then make handwritten notes on them using a stylus.

This isn’t to say that anything cloud-based is automatically “good”. There are some great applications for teaching and learning through the cloud, but it has its pitfalls like anything else. That’s another blog post for later, though.

There was a session by Craig Bentley on the “flipped classroom”, using video to teach the content to students while they were at home, then doing the exercises or practical work in the classroom, with the teacher present as the “guide on the side”.

What I took away from that session was this: flipped classroom does work well, but if you undertake the creation of the resources yourself, it’s a lot of work. You also have to weigh up certain risks, like potentially finding your video posted on Facebook, for example.  Having said that, if your video is a good enough teaching resource which puts the content across clearly, is there a reason to worry about where it turns up? Each individual teacher would need to weigh this up in his or her own mind before going ahead.

Other sessions I attended focussed on the ins and outs of PA (Keith Huxtable), constructivist music pedagogy (Antony Hubmayer), the important issue of copyright pertaining to the use of digital media in the classroom (Barbara Freedman), using the iPad as a sheet music viewer (Tim Nikolsky), arranging and mixing using (legally obtained) stems from songs like “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (Katie Wardrobe), creating 30-second compositions for jingles and ringtones and using the iPad as a digital mixer (Adrian Alexander),  the student-centred notation class (George Hess), and creating online resources using iBooks Author (Samuel Wright). That’s just a tiny snippet of everything that was going on each day.

Can I just add here: I’m really sorry to the presenters of each of the above for not going into the content further, but I’ll never get this post published if I try. The fact is that I’m still trying to absorb everything that I learned from you, so I’m not sure how much I could articulate at this point. Hopefully I’ll be able to blog about my work with your ideas later down the track.

Keynotes

There were three great keynote presentations delivered by Scott Watson, Barbara Freedman, and James Humberstone. Composition, and the various ways to approach it, was a recurring theme and there were points coming from each presentation which seemed to connect and tie in nicely with each other. Scott talked about limiting the choices or parameters given to students in order to let their creativity take off. Barbara’s angle was, “I hate the phrase think outside the box. I say, teach kids the box.”

James talked about project-based learning and the necessary requirement for the teacher to do the project first. But he pointed out that this is in the nature of music teaching anyway: we always do it ourselves first. So instead of advocating for music to merely have a place in the curriculum, why not advocate for music to lead the way in curriculum? Hear hear!

Suade

This was the group who performed for us at the conference dinner and gave a session on live-looping the following day. They gave what I thought was a great performance combining the classic barber-shop quartet with loops recorded on the spot. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and now I’m wondering whether a looping system might fit in the school’s budget so I can try it with my classes and/or choir.

Afterthoughts

I’ve owned an Avid M-Audio Producer microphone and an M-Box mini for some time now, but (surprisingly for a geek) I never got around to using them. I had tried to connect up Protools and an M-Box at my last school, but technical hitches always got in the way so it never ended up working properly. Maybe the new teacher will figure it out now that they have some new hardware. But I was reluctant to pull this stuff out and connect it up at home, as a result.

Well, mtec2013 has inspired me to try again, and I have finally gotten around to using a usb mic with Audacity. I was up till something like one o’clock last night recording a choral piece I wrote into a thirty-voice choir. I’m not quite ready to post it here yet; it still needs a bit of cleaning up and polishing. But my relationship with recording and mixing has begun at last.

On that note, I really can’t not share this little video that Barbara Freedman showed us in her keynote:

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Hopefully my own choir piece doesn’t need quite that much polishing!

To finish, here’s an idea: how about all the keynote speakers for mtec2015 wear different coloured fluourescent odd socks?

So for the first day of school today, not only did I see brand new faces, I was a brand new face myself.

I’ve had a couple of emails from people who have submitted new sites to be added to my library. Thankyou very much for these and keep them coming. However, please bear with me for the next week or so while I find my feet in a new place. As soon as I’ve settled in, the first thing on my list is to update the library and get into blogging again. It really is one of the best professional development tools I’ve come across. If you don’t blog yet, I highly recommend it, even if it’s just for yourself and maybe a few invited guests.

I am teaching Music again this year for years 8-12, as well as a senior Art class. I’m also hoping to get a choir up and running, so I’m really hoping I can find an able accompanist. I can play keyboard a little, but not to the extent that I can do that and wave my hands in the air at the same time.

MTEC 2013 is coming up in April. I’m definitely hoping to get there myself. Early bird rates happen up till February 25, so if you haven’t registered yet, get in quick. The Maryborough Music Conference 2013 is also happening in July. I’ve never been able to get to one of these yet so I’m hoping that this year will be my first. It sounds great.

Best wishes for everyone starting a fresh new year! Also, thoughts going out to those doing it tough and going through delays because of the current floods and recent fires. Hope things get better very quickly for you guys.

Back to School Tasmanian Bushfire Appeal

SSR Qld Back to School Floods Appeal

MiCN: Can We Help DunalleySchool?

Red Cross Tasmanian Bushfires Appeal 2013

Red Cross Qld Floods Appeal 2013

I don’t tend to do a lot of PowerPoint these days, but I do have a number of them lying around in various stages of construction. I’ve uploaded six which seem to me to be the most complete, succinct, and/or potentially useful for other music teachers. I’ll upload others as I get around to fixing them up.

You’ll find them on my Resources and Lesson Plans page, under “Various Music PowerPoints”. The ones I have in the collection so far are:

• Doctrine of Affections
• Grunge Music
• Hip Hop
• Music of Sub-Saharan Africa
• Renaissance Music
• Tones, Semitones, and Scales

All of them are easily editable if you need to change or add anything.

To begin with, how’s this for a view?

We stayed here with my parents for the first few days before my sister and her fiance joined us from New York. This balcony (a very sizeable one by Paris standards) was right outside our bedroom.

Considering the importance of Notre Dame in musical history, I think this was just about the best view that a music teacher could wake up to every morning. We attended Mass there a number of times as well, and I had the opportunity to hear the Gregorian Mass on our last evening in Paris.

I also bought a book from there: “Les Heures de Notre Dame”, with liturgical chants written in the old music notation and then transcribed to the modern stave. They don’t appear to include the organum chants of the Notre Dame School, though. Most of them are monophonic, syllabic chant, and I can’t seem to find any references for when each of them were composed. I gather from the introduction (in my somewhat limited French) that they were collected and put together around 1990. I might have actually heard a couple of them in that last Gregorian Mass, but I can’t remember and I haven’t had time yet to go through the book in much detail.

Quite close to Notre Dame is another little church and one of the oldest in Paris, Église St Julian le Pauvre, which is used regularly as a concert space. I went there one evening to hear a piano recital of works by Chopin and Liszt. I was in music-nerd heaven.

We also went to London…and this was a different kettle of fish. London was a tough nut to crack. I had been looking forward to seeing it, but it ended up leaving me a little bit cold.

Not that you can’t see and do lots of great stuff in London. We saw the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Observatory, London Bridge, the Tower of London, the Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, and lots of other stuff besides. We saw Les Mis at Queens Theatre at West End on our last evening. We even ran into the Paralympic Torch Parade (quite by accident) on our way to the Tower of London.

So we saw lots of stuff that we liked and thought was fantastic in London. It’s just that we didn’t really like…well, London. Having said that, we were slightly more relaxed about pickpockets and scammers while we were there. In Paris, I found that a little coin-purse I had in my pocket at the top of the Eiffel Tower had disappeared by the time I reached the bottom. In London, there’s CCTV everywhere you go. London is the original home of Big Brother.

We also went to Bath and Stonehenge, which was a very cool day out. Bath is stunning. I had also hoped to visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, but unfortunately we didn’t have the time.

Maybe it’s that I’m from French heritage, but my heart is in France and I was glad to return there after London. On our last weekend, I met some members of my family who live in Chantilly, a very beautiful area not far from Paris. There’s other family also in Brittany, but I didn’t get to go this time. There will definitely be a next time, though.

It wasn’t “love at first sight”, but I think it’s fair to say that I fell in love with Paris and France in general, and now that I’m home, I’m homesick.

When other teachers told me that their students were also struggling, I felt a little better…but only a little.

So I decided to change my approach.

The Email List

After marking all my semester one maths exams and reflecting upon the results, I sat down and started ringing parents – every single one of them, whether their child had passed or failed. I invited them to join an email list, so I could send them class work and homework, plus any helpful attachments like textbook pages or links to video tutorials.

When I did this, I learned something: parents in general are on my side. They are on our side. They want to know what’s going on. They love the idea of being informed about homework, because their kids are always saying, “I don’t have any.”  They want to be involved, and they love the open line of communication between themselves and the teacher. Accordingly, they were thrilled to come on board.

I confess, there was a time when I didn’t realise this. I’m an introvert by nature and very shy about ringing people I don’t know. Whenever I had to ring a parent, especially in my earlier years as a teacher, my face would turn white and my stomach would churn. This was not helped by the fact that it was usually something negative that I had to call them about.

But now that I’ve started emailing, it’s a whole different ball game. I much prefer writing to speaking. Having to stand up in front of a big group of people and talk every day is decidedly not my preferred way of doing things. I love writing though, and I love that I can write to the parents.

The first thing I noted after doing this was an immediate improvement in both behaviour and homework throughout the whole class. It especially warmed my heart when one student, who was notorious for not getting his homework done, showed me three pages of volume and surface area equations that his dad had made him do over the weekend. Another student told me, in an ever-so-slightly disconcerted tone, that her mother had started talking to her about Pythagoras over breakfast.

Those who hadn’t completed their homework had not done so, not out of laziness or forgetfulness, but because they didn’t understand it, but at least they’d given it a shot. Either that, or I received an email from the parents to say they hadn’t had time because of some other circumstance.

But not a single dog has eaten so much as a page of homework since the parents came on board.

Virtual Classrooms

This is something I experimented with in music over the past couple of years, but it didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped. I’m trying it again with maths, and it’s working a treat. I’m getting such positive feedback that I’m planning to get my music classes back online.

You may be familiar which a virtual classroom. Basically, it’s an online learning environment, and there are lots of different platforms that run it. The ones I run are on Blackboard, but there’s also Moodle and many others.

What I do for each lesson is write a dot-point list for class work and homework, attaching a pdf of the relevant pages from the textbook. I also hunt around for videos from YouTube which explain the concept we’re working on. I’ll generally try to get at least two or three different ones that will explain the same concept. That way, I figure that if the students don’t get it when I explain it, maybe someone else’s explanation might work. Links to other websites get put in as well, so I end up with a bit of a library much like the one one this blog.

My class has had the virtual classroom (VCR) for nearly two weeks, and today they were proudly showing me their books. Nearly three quarters of the class said they’ve done more maths since our work went online, than they had done in the entire first semester. What it really enables them to do is work at their own pace. If they know how to do the work, they can just go ahead while I explain it to the rest of the class. They can go back and forth as much as they need.

But the most important thing for me is the fact that, not only are they working more, they’re enjoying maths more. They’re more engaged. One student in particular has done a complete 180-degree about-face in his attitude. Last semester, he and I would be at loggerheads every other week. These days, he’s still as talkative as ever, but he’s doing the work. Others are getting the work done so fast that I sometimes have a hard time keeping up.

My thoughts so far…

So far, there has been a definite improvement in behaviour, homework and general engagement with the subject. I will be very interested to see how that translates into assessment results.

I think the VCR is a huge help, because students can just open up their laptops and away they go. For those who don’t have the laptops, there are hard copies of the textbook and the set work is also written up on the board. They seem to do fine as well. It appears to be the general culture of the classroom that has changed for the better, with regards to getting the work done.

However, while the VCR is great, I think the thing that’s really been helping my students the most is the extra push that they’re now getting from home. I’m coming to realise that the parents are really the most important link, and I now wonder why I didn’t do this ten years ago. It has given me a great opportunity to build relationships with them, and to let them be really involved.

It does take a lot of work to set up and put into place. Also, I sense that others’ expectations of me as a teacher may be raised dramatically. Parents will now expect to hear from me regularly. Students will expect the work to be uploaded on time, and they will expect that their parents will know about it. I have a feeling, however, that this could be an ounce of prevention that is worth several pounds of cure.

Having said that, I won’t sugar-coat it and tell you that it’s necessarily an easy undertaking. On the contrary, it can be a daunting task. For one class, it took me two weeks to contact every parent. In the first week of the new term, my workload also increased tenfold; I went to bed every night at 3am.

The good news is that this initial period does settle down, once you get the ball rolling. I am now back to going to bed at a reasonable hour. I also know that it won’t be so difficult or take quite so long the next time around, because I’ve done it before.

One of the best things for me personally, is that the email list and the VCR both work to an important strength of mine: I’m a writer, and I write far better than I speak. Writing is how I think. If I don’t write about something, I can’t think about it quite as clearly.

Since I’m a writer, I think the students get to see a different aspect of my personality when I write to them on the VCR. Certainly, I feel like my rapport with them has been immensely improved by the fact that I write to them. I feel like they can know me better. Big groups are not my thing, and writing has really helped me feel more comfortable, which makes me less stressed, which makes for a more pleasant maths teacher.

In the meantime, I apologize for altogether disappearing from the radar for the last few months. It has been stupidly busy, and to be honest, I kind of lost the habit of blogging. I am resolved to turn back from the dark side, though, as I really do much better at things when I write about them.

Secondary Schools Choral Festival

For the second year in a row, my choir had the privilege of working with renowned choral director David Lawrence. They had a one and a half hour workshop, then a rehearsal together with students of four other school choirs. All of them performed together that night for the Secondary Schools Choral Festival in Mackay last Friday night.

I was particularly excited because the song which my choir performed was actually written by one of the students. She wrote it two years ago when she was in grade ten. It impressed me so much that I was resolved to arrange it for the choir. This year I did just that, and it was performed to a very impressed audience.

I have a MuseScore file of her song in the choral arrangement, which I will post on this blog when I get a few moments to polish it up (with her permission).

The night before that performance, I attended a workshop which David Lawrence also held, this one for choral conductors. I hadn’t attended one of these in a long time, so I was really excited. Many years ago I studied choral conducting at the Brisbane Conservatorium with Dr John Nickson, which was one of my favourite classes. I spent the evening trying to reconnect with those concepts I’d learned back then, under David’s helpful guidance. It was one of the best workshops I’ve attended in a long time and I found myself wishing I could attend conducting classes.

I was especially glad because there had been a week-long choral conducting workshop in Brisbane over the recent holidays, but I had been unable to attend.

After the workshop, we all went out for dinner, during which I introduced David to Twitter and telling him why he should tweet. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll have another new follower soon…and then I’ll have to introduce him to all of you guys.

So, hi.

It has been an exhausting first half of term one. I’ve been asking colleagues whether they’ve been feeling the pinch as well, just to make sure it’s not my imagination, and they confirm: the last five weeks have hit us all like a freight train.

One of the (several) new things going on lately has been the recent roll-out of laptops for students in years 9 and 10. For those year levels, we have therefore been in the process of adapting to the delivery of a 1:1 curriculum. Some of us are finding it easier than others.

Oddly enough, I find myself being extremely conservative and cautious at this initial stage. So far, I have had only one lesson where I have allowed my students to use their laptops, and that was on a day where I was absent and I set some work online. That was for a music class. For maths, I haven’t allowed it yet at all.

It’s not that I’m against 1:1. Are you kidding? I’m a total geek and I love working with technology. I really look forward to using laptops in lessons when I feel that I’ve laid enough of the proper groundwork. But I don’t want them to totally take over and be used indiscriminately, as a be-all-and-end-all.

Part of the problem is the fact that it’s early days. We’ve never had this before, so it’s all still novel. As far as many students are concerned, we’ve just handed each of them one more way to “plug in” and feed their addiction. Getting some of them to think of a laptop as a learning tool and not just a mobile entertainment unit can be quite a trick.

So I’ve been working on instilling this expectation in my students: have the laptops there, ready and available, but only for exercises and tasks which I specifically set. Part of that process has been to require students to have their laptops with them but closed, for whole lessons at a time.

So what’s the use of having them there? Plenty, but I want my students to have the habit of not expecting to stare at a screen all lesson.

Working with laptops seems to be much like working with glockenspiels. Anyone who has ever tried to teach with thirty glockenspiels can attest to this fact: as long as you’re talking to the class, those things need to be closed. Not “there and open”. Closed. They get opened and played only on direct instructions.

Laptops are also extremely noisy, though not precisely in the same way. In fact, the very nature of laptops means that they can each be fifty times as noisy as fifty glockenspiels put together, yet not make a single sound. They are capable of creating all kinds of mental – and emotional – noise, which makes it next to impossible for a student to concentrate on anything you might wish for them to learn.

So my exercise with them lately has been to start by filtering out a bit of the noise. I guess what I’m trying to teach them at this early stage – while it’s all still a novelty – is a measure of self-discipline. I have students who sit down and automatically open their laptops, and they are told very firmly to close them up.

They must find that frustrating, to say the least. The addictive nature of technology for those who are susceptible has been documented, and statistically there’s a good possibility that at least one or two of them must feel like they’re breaking out into a cold sweat.

So be it.

Not that I don’t sympathize. Skyrim is my personal fix at the moment. There are times when I really do have to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and force myself to turn the game off so I can get lessons prepared for tomorrow, or just so I can get a good night’s sleep. It can be hard to do: slaying dragons and defeating deathlord draugrs feels so much better than marking test papers or doing laundry. I feel way more powerful when I can fire ice spikes or balls of flame from my bare hands to kill a frost troll. Somehow wielding a red pen just doesn’t feel quite so…cool.

As far as laptops in the classroom are concerned, I still feel the need to prepare myself further for 1:1 delivery before I let students go ahead. If laptops are going to be used, the purpose needs to be clear, and the content needs to be specifically created for delivery through technology in its original form – not just a “digital version” of something I can find readily available elsewhere.

I’m waiting with bated breath for Musescore, Staff Wars, and Acid Xpress to be installed on them all. I’m looking through my links library and putting together a suite of web resources which don’t cause too much hassle for the school’s network filter and download speed. I’m also nosing around for some good maths and logic games and tools for my maths class (if you know any good ones, please pass them on!).

Once these are in place, hopefully together with some expectation on the part of the students for purposeful, balanced and discriminate use, we can open up the laptops.

I’m teaching maths as well as music this year, so I may have some maths-based thoughts, reflections, and resources stashed into this blog as the year goes on. Also, thinking of taking my Master degree back up again, but switching from Guidance Counselling to a straight Master of Education. I finish it quicker that way.

Took a break over Christmas by visiting my parents down in Brisbane, and then further south to visit hubby’s mum down in NSW, where our minimum temperature was their maximum, and the region’s internet was powered by one guy pedalling away on a stationary bike. Hence, no blog updates. Returned home to a very sick cat, but she’s better now.

I see that a number of people have been downloading my planners and powerpoints. I’m glad you guys are finding them useful. As I make more, I’ll keep putting  them up here of course.

Have a great year, people!

Lots went on for me in the first two thirds of the year. In the last third, innovation was put on the back-burner for a while and other things took over, like surviving the final exam season and getting our seniors through to graduation.

Now that I once again have some time to think, I’ve been looking over the units I’ve taught this year. I’m going to completely rewrite a couple, as I’ve been teaching them for a while now and I’m getting quite bored. I’ve been looking through some of the sites in my library for ideas, and I’ve found some more useful websites so I’ll put those in too.

I’m glad to see that the resources I uploaded are getting some good use. I see a number of people have been downloading my PowerPoints on the elements of music. When I get around to creating some more, I’ll add them to my uploads as well.

In the meantime, I actually lost my password for my email account for a while, and finally found it again today. So if you went to my “Contact Me” page and sent me an email anytime in the last three-ish months, I haven’t been purposely ignoring you, I promise! Anyone who sent me websites for me to look over and add to my library, I’ll be checking them out and putting them in the appropriate pages. Thankyou to those who sent them. If you have any more, please pass them on and I’ll add them…more quickly this time.

I’m thinking of creating another blog, as a sister to this one, dedicated to mental health and relaxation. Neither of these are my strong suit at the best of times, and teaching doesn’t tend to be one of the more relaxing jobs out there. As a person who has suffered anxiety and depression, I know the importance – and the difficulty – of maintaining good mental health. Maybe I’ll add a page to my library dedicated to mental health links, to begin with. What do you think? Good idea?

To that end, I created the LINKS library (top menu). This library is the main raison d’être of MusicTeachnTech.com. If you haven’t yet checked it out, please do so. You’ll find heaps of great resources created by educators and specialists from all over the world, and I update as I find new stuff.

I’ve rearranged a few things today. Music Technology, Music Software, and Mobile Learning have now all been shifted to the Music Teaching Resources category. So if you’re looking for them and can’t seem to find them, mouse over that link in the top menu, and they’ll show up there.

A couple of new links have been added today to Music Software. Wendy Strauss brought my attention to Mario Paint Composer and Jam Studio, so these have both been added. Wendy’s own fantastic website has also got its own spot under Music Teaching Resources: Theory and Reference.

If you know of any good websites I can add, or if you have one yourself, please let me know about it by emailing me through the Contact page. I’ll check it out, and most likely it will find a new home in one of the library’s many categories.