Music at Moonlight

There are several different characteristics of a leader such as authentic, vulnerable, accepting, present, and useful. Most people can tell if someone is a good or effective leader even without knowing specific characteristics. To have a work environment that is productive with people who are happy requires a leader to empower their workers or team members. This article goes over the top ten principles of empowerment. The following videos show different instances of leaders and their characteristics and how they empower people. I think this clip from the movie Lean on Me  is an example of a poor leader. Mr. Clark comes into a meeting with the school staff and does not listen to what they have to say. He starts changing positions and jobs around within the staff and is tearing down any community they have built throughout the school. Mr. Clark does seem aware of the issues facing the school, but is not aware of the staff's opinion or thoughts on anything. Mr. Clark even go...

In elementary music we play games all the time. These games are not online, but games we play while singing a song we learned and we move around the room to keep students active while we learn. My students are use to playing games in class, so I think incorporating online games would be an easy switch to make. Gamification is a term that I am hearing more often. Teachers are trying to use more games in their classroom to help motivate students. The article Gamification: Using game like elements to redesign our classrooms  says gamification does not have to mean playing online games in the classroom, but it is "changing the atmosphere of the classroom to make it more game-like." Having a game-like atmosphere in the classroom can help students to become more motivated and can promote persistence, collaboration, and creativity. Using games in the classroom and creating a game-like atmosphere can have a great effect on students. A survey I found interesting was done in 2013 b...

In my classroom I have not used technology for collaborating due to lack of devices, and sometimes lack of knowledge on my part. At an elementary level sometimes it seems easier to have students collaborate face to face, but that is not really setting them up for successful technology use in the future. I think an easy way for me to implement collaboration would be to add Skype in the classroom. We talk about different composers in music and I think it would be awesome if I could find a composer to Skype with so students could ask them questions and learn what goes into composing music from a composer point of view. Skype could also work with talking to a musician on a certain instrument that we have been learning about or an instrument family. There are several ways that I could use Skype in my classroom and it would hopefully not cost me anything, it would just take time finding someone willing to talk to my classes and setting up a time. In order to have students collaborate wit...

In my classroom I think the overarching goal for students is to be able to read and perform music as well as evaluate their performance, as well as others, to help them improve. In order to accomplish this in 4th grade we learn to play recorders. When we start I try to show students videos of what we will be working towards to give them a goal to look forward to. I also use recorder karate and students get a piece of yarn to tie onto their recorder each time they master a piece of music. At the end of the unit we get to take our recorders and play and sing along with the Kansas City Symphony at the Kauffman Center. In an elementary room, giving students a recorder and pieces of string usually gets them pretty excited and they can't wait to try to get to the black belt. When we start working I tell students about my first experience with recorders and how I could not play them well at first and was not excelling at the same rate as the rest of my class. This frustrated me and some...

My first encounter with Google was during my undergrad at MNU. We used Google Docs to work on writing papers together or Slides to create group presentations. I loved using Google because it allowed us to work together with all our crazy schedules. My first year of teaching my district made the switch over to Google. There were several teachers in my building who did not like this because they had to learn something new. I loved it because I was already familiar with Google, but I was in no way an expert on all it has to offer. Somehow I became the go to person for my building and I still have teachers coming to me for Google questions. I have not had the opportunity to use many Google apps with my students due to the lack of technology devices in our building. I would love to have students collaborate together and create a presentation about a composer using Slides. Using Forms would be a great way to get formative feedback quickly on a topic we are learning about. Once we have mo...

If I were getting to select what type of technology devices I would most benefit from in my classroom I would choose a variety. I would love to have a few iPads in my classroom for different music apps that students could take turns using. There are limitations to what the iPad can do, so I think we would also benefit from having laptops in the classroom. From the article Choosing the Right Device for Digital Learning, Bob Moore says "devices designed and intended for simple app use and content browsing on mobile web sites are not idea tools for students." An iPad may not support a task students are asked to complete due to how it is created or the operating system it uses. However, Chromebooks or laptops will not run the music apps I would like to use in my classroom like GarageBand or forScore , among others. For a whole school or district, I don't think tablets are the way to go. They can do a lot, but teachers will not get the maximum potential they could from a ...