DONE

I think that word about says it all...

Now, do I want to do this for a living?.....

Could be fun

Toddler Music notes

So, as much as I said ahead of time that I would NOT let it happen in my house, I have to confess that several "Children's Music" CD's have found their way in to the heavy playlist around the house. The not-so-surprising thing is, there is a LOT of really horrible children's music out there. Where is it written that children somehow wont / cant respond to regular music - it has to be bland, overproduced, and vapid (yes, I mean Barney!)

What I have found, though, is that there are gems hidden in this very rough rough. I will set aside the work my group does, since of course I am biased when it comes to our own work. However, I do recommend a series of CD's released by Putomayo, such as World Music for Little Ears, and Singalong with Putomayo. These recordings feature big name musicians, not doing children's music persay, but rather performing good music that children will enjoy. I can actually stand most of it!

The newest discovery is a couple of CD's done by Sandra Boynton, author of many fun, silly children's books. One in particular, Philadelphia Chicken, is made to sound like a Broadway review, with the big names to go with it. My wife and I have fun placing the songs in real Broadway shows, or re-casting the songs.

However, as good as this music is, I dont recommend waking up with one of the songs in your head, as it is GUARANTEED to be lodged there permanently for at least 28 hours. Yes, I have spent an entire day humming a cute little ditty about 15 pets that have all been named Bob (except for Simon James ALexander the Third...) PLEASE someone tell me they know what I am talking about here....

Quick Update

O.k. - so, the next time I say that I want to create several movies combining live action and animation, somebody slap me and point me towards the geniuses at Pixar! I have pretty much decided at this point that if I am ever going to complete this project anywhere close to on time, I am going to have to rethink my instructional video strategy. I think that at this point I am going to take the work and technology I know from Flash animation and just use them. I have some material I can rework from a previous project (my Nick Beat character) that I can resurrect for these four lessons, and I think the result will be as effective, if not as technically proficient. I would like to follow up on the Chromakey work at a later time, I just think that I reached the point where I had to fish or cut bait, as it is said.

Other than this re-direction, the rest of the project is proceeding well, I just need to find the hours amid the California trips, concerts, and auditorium events (not to mention raising an 18 month old) to get it all done.

Weird Instrument Day

Today was weird instrument day in my music appreciation class. This was a tradition I started several years ago when I was teaching elementary general music. One of the occupational hazards I have had to endure is that any time I am near a "weird instrument," I feel the need to add it to my collection. Among others, I have acquired a set of Indian Tablas, a Tibetan prayer bowl, several ocarinas of various shapes and sizes, udu drums, a thunder drum, and (always the students' favorite) a nose flute. I am currently working on adding a Chinese Pipa to the collection (basically the Chinese version of the mandolin). 

Now that I am teaching High School, I still find the "weird instrument" day a fun tool to use in the class. By about 2/3's of the way through the course, the students are feeling pretty burned out from covering 1000 years of Western Musical History, so they get to decompress for a day while I bring in the more bizarre specimens of my collection. I give the students a chance to try a couple out (not the nose flute, though, for I dont think any of my students want to share my nose...), and in general, just try to open their eyes and ears a bit about the variety of instruments that the world musical traditions have produced. 

It has occurred to me as I do these presentations, that the average student has such a limited experience when it comes to exposure to various sounds of instruments. The pop world is filled with the sounds of essentially 5-7 instruments, and unless a student goes out to involve themselves in more, that is about it. It is always fun for me to see an otherwise "jaded" high schooler, suddenly get very interested as I make a piece of PVC and a spring make thunder, or a clay pot sound like an entire drum kit.

Some may look on my weird instrument day as simply a "filler" class with little educational value, but I know otherwise. Sometimes it takes a little "weird" to bring the mundane back into focus.

Coming Along, with Adjustments

A quick update on the progress towards my CCSU project. I have migrated my Mandopelli site over to Dreamweaver, and have become more comfortable with the user interface of that program. I am still not as proficient as I was with GoLive, but it is coming along. The basic framework for my instructional unit page is done, using the Spry elements, particularly the tabbed panels widget. This approach is greatly simplifying the navigation across my unit. My enrichment podcasts are almost finished. I am providing one with each unit focusing on a different world percussion instrument. The podcasts were created in GarageBand and will be finally processed as flash video files for posting to the site. The videos are proving to be as complicated as I thought. The ChromaKey is pretty easy to use in Final Cut Pro, but the difficulty lies in creating the visual connection between the live an animated characters. I dont want to get too hung up on this, so my fallback would be to go back to all Flash animation, and just use Nick Beat by himself, along the lines of the work I did in the Flash class at CCSU. Other odds and ends are coming along as well. 

More later

Thoughts on rhythm

I wanted to take this post to talk a bit about the philosophy behind my approach to the teaching of rhythm. My educational instruction background was focused heavily on Gordon-based learning theory, which when applied to music, basic means that you start music instruction with the most basic of elements, and then work towards synthesizing those elements together into ever more complex and involved music tasks. For example, rather than sitting a fourth grader down at their first lesson, putting an instrument in their hands and a music book on the stand, pointing to a note on the page, showing them what fingers to put down, and then telling them to blow, this approach would first teach the elements separately, such as reading skills apart from fingering skills, etc.

I have tried to adopt this approach to my teaching of rhythm and pitch in the general music classroom, by attempting to break down rhythm and pitch into the simplest and most separate elements and dealing with each as a single skill. Only once a student has demonstrated a mastery of each item, do I move on to putting those elements together.

Specifically with rhythm, I start by separating the writing or notation of rhythm from what rhythm actually is, which is sound in time. I then further break down the sound of rhythm into six basic concepts, two being foundational, and the other four, constructional. The first two are Steady Beat and Meter, which I approach from a performance-based direction. Once these two are understood, and can be used to provide the foundation for rhythm construction, I deal with the four rhythm tools (LIA, Scissors, Glue and Eraser). I purposefully use common household items as my descriptors so that the perceived mystery behind rhythm construction can be overcome.

As I point out in my instruction, with these six simple concepts, along with their performance tools, one can approach rhythms of any complexity with a greater understanding and a greater level of success. Start with the basics, unencumbered with non-essential concepts or distractions, and success will follow.

What Rhythm Is! Technical notes

Here I want to outline the technologies I hope to use in the creation of my online lesson on "What Rhythm Is!"

First, I am going to be using Dreamweaver as my main authoring software. I have always been a GoLive user, but as that product is now being phased out by Adobe, it is time for me to make the switch. I had originally created my Mandopelli site using GoLive, but I have now migrated it to Dreamweaver, and am trying to become comfortable with the new syntax and structure of the program.

Secondly, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am going to use a particular feature of Dreamweaver, known as Spry, to create the main structure of my unit page. This should allow me to streamline the navigation of the unit as I can organize both my units, and the content of each unit, into a series of navigation tabs. This will also get me into CSS a bit more, as Spry is based heavily on style sheets for its formatting.

For the actual content, I am going to use instructional videos that will combine flash animation elements with live video (via Chromakey). I want to set up a "interview" format where I will be talking with an animated character (Nik Beat, from an earlier CCSU class). I have done limited work with Chromakey filtering, and I do anticipate that this portion of the project will be the most challenging to pull off. I will see how it goes.

Additionally, each unit will have a podcast with images (created in GarageBand), downloadable materials (created in InDesign), an assessment tool, using forms and form-to-email for feedback, and other weblinks. Other elements will be added as I go.

Rhythm, Part 2

O.k. I wanted to take this post to talk a bit about the unit I am going to be presenting for this project. I call it, "What Rhythm Is!" and I have developed it over the last 10 years of teaching general music classes to k-8 students. I have taught and been taught many different approaches to the instruction of rhythm, and found myself in the classroom combining elements from several of them as I developed my own method.

First, I make a clear distinction in my instruction between the notation of rhythm, which is an artificial writing system that really has nothing to do with what rhythms actually are, and the actual sounding of rhythms, or organization of sound in time, which is what rhythm is. Most people immediately think of half notes and quarter rests and time signatures when you ask about rhythm, but I want people to think about beats, and divisions and combination of those beats.

I further try to break down those rhythm elements into six easy-to-manage concepts. They are: Steady Beat, Meter, and the four rhythm tools (Leave it Alone, Scissors, Glue and Eraser). I show that with an understanding of those six concepts, one can create and perform virtually any rhythm imaginable. Only once a solid understanding exists of these concepts, do I approach the business of writing rhythms down.

I have found this approach to be pretty successful in the classroom with many different age and ability levels, and I am looking forward to seeing how I can translate this unit into an online learning environment.

I've Got Rhythm...

Over the next few months, I am going to be working on adding an online educational unit to my website. I am hoping that this will be the first of many that will allow me to share my own particular "Basics of Music" approach with the public. I am also working on this as part of a Dreamweaver class I am taking at CCSU towards my Master's Degree in Educational Technology. 

I have been involved with the creation and management of many websites, so I am going to use this class to try to extend my knowledge of web elements beyond what I have done in the past. For example, to present my various lessons and materials, I am going to use Spry elements, which are pre-scripted interactive elements in Dreamweaver. By using a Spry tabbed panel setup, I hope to simplify the navigation around my lesson. I am also going to try to get my own Blog software up on my site, at which point I will migrate this blog to there. I will post updates here on how it is all going. 

I guess that is all for now. I just wanted to post a marker for the beginning of this project as I get started. I will be back to talk more about the project itself.