W eek 4

Chapter 4 in Music Learning Today covered quite a range of technologies, but the thing I appreciated most was covering the imperative of considering the need for psychomotor development of our students through practice in order to improve their ultimate performance.  We have all been taught the importance of slow practice but it was helpful to read of the research that backs that up.  Once that is firmly understood, we can then move on to find technology solutions that can help develop those psychomotor skills in appropriate ways.  Specific technologies such as digital metronomes and tuners can help in keeping slow practice consistent and helping develop the muscle memory needed to perform at high levels once things are worked up to proper speed.  Smartmusic's looping feature can enable us to help students to learn how to focus on difficult passages repeatedly for more efficiency.  Digital recording can make it easier to record student practices and performances so that they can better hear themselves and begin to learn how to better evaluate and improve their own performances.  The multi-page chart provided by Dr. Bauer makes for a great reference tool to keep on hand to find suggestions for solutions to a number of different problem areas.  The discussion posts relating to these issues also helped provide a number of other possibilities beyond what are listed in the book.

The Audacity project was quite a challenge for those of us who are not the most tech oriented like myself.  The tutorials on lynda.com were tremendously helpful in learning the basics of how to work within the program and accomplish the assigned tasks.  The combination of being able to see the soundwaves did make it much easier to work with the sound files than it would have been with just the sounds alone.  Realizing that Finale compositions can be exported as .wav files, it would be fairly easy to create our own files for use in these type of exercises.  These type of assignments could be used with students to help them learn the program as well.  Being a free cloud based program makes Audacity practical for this type of use - even for schools with limited budgets.

Listening to the various compositions by other members of the class was quite interesting.  It is amazing how so many different pieces can be constructed out of basically the same raw material.  I know that this is true in a general sense of all composition, but with a finite number of preprogrammed loops in Soundation it is truly amazing to see the wide variety of ideas contained in those compositions.

I am also enjoying the wide variety of information coming in through the PLN.  I wasn't sure how this would work at the beginning, but I have come to appreciate it more and more as time goes on and others share different bits of information about new things they have discovered.