Thing 17 blogger's choice

For my Thing 17 choice I selected Musipedia. Perhaps it was the site avatar that drew me in due to it's similarity to the textbook cover of Musicophilia, but it is an incredible mixture of both historical data as well as creative.

In short, the application for which I envision educational use is with music theory curriculum.

Students are able to input specific pitch and rhythm information to serve as a search query into the site's data base. The returns provide mp3 versions of songs closely matching the search query parameters/information. Also, youtube videos of each song are provided, as well as copyright information, composer, song title, categorization, print music vendors of the selection, etc.

Students will have their eyes opened to structural components of music and the vast body of work which exists simply from a few motifs of pitch or rhythm which they enter.

Thing 16 Podcasting

I have been exposed to just a few podcasts previously, but found them to be informative and user friendly in that I could determine when viewing best fit my schedule. I was interested in this THING 16 to delve deeper into the video options.

My experience with itunes was quite frankly lame. There was no easily found navigation tutorial on site, I kept receiving error reports, network connection could not be made to videos I selected, and a couple had terrible 'hiccups'. Additionally, most of the returns from my search query simply were old and had not content and/or would not upload.

I subscribed to Bob Appetit and Startcooking.com [which worked nicely] because I am very much into culinary arts and prepare nearly every meal in our home.

ipadio was a much better experience for me, although I had reservations setting up the account when realizing I would be calling the UK and didn't want to divulge my home number. In retrospect it ended up being a fact finding exercise as I have the lowest technology cell phone that exists-a Tracfone. It worked fine, which means that if one wanted to use this application with students-and yes I recognize many students do not have or simply do not use cell phones, even the lamest of product would still work.

Possible applications: interviewing musicians!! audio data collection! I suppose students could establish an account and carry their phone, then they can capture ANY live performance. Wonder about the legality of that though.

I did find during a search how one instructor utilized the ipadio application for a semester exam study guide:

http://www.ipadio.com/phlogs/WesleyFryer/2011/4/29/Final-Exam-Study-Guide--Technology-4-Teachers


At any rate, below is a brief reading from a great book that I suggest every teacher investigate:

Thing 15 Slide Share

Experience: Had a few uh oh's dealing with this, as Slide Share wouldn't send confirmation email to school email instantly-so unfortunately had to re-route to private email, which I don't like to do so much. Finally got the download to function. It's a powerpoint.

Classmate blogs on which I commented: Mr. Kuhn & Mr. Laub.

Rationale: The Show I selected is because not only do I run marathons, but I also run Ultramarathons, which by definition would be any distance longer than 26.2 miles. In two weeks both my wife and I return to the "Howl At The Moon" 8 hour Ultramarathon over by Danville in a County Park. Basically it's this: a 3.29 mile trail loop that participants keep running to see how far you can go in 8 hours. She competes in the walking division & I do the running division. Obviously nutrition is vital in such an event-so I searched for resources of this ilk.

Last year she covered 27+ miles in her first Ultra and I covered 48 miles running. Team Jones will shoot for the 80 mile barrier this year.

Hope our fueling holds up!

Long Course Nutrition

View more presentations from Food Coach For You

Thing 14 Screen Capture [Screenr]

This is a a very nice tool. I will use it for Music Theory I in order to provide a resource/online tutorial on how to navigate specific trainers.

I also believe this tool could be used in conjunction with other 2.0 tools very easily, i.e. critiquing a performance. IOW, what to look for.

As others have posted, I had to update java first in order to download the application. Also, trying to find where the itty-bitty never-used-but-once-in-a-blue-moon microphone was amidst the rearranged lower level during renovation proved to be a slight challenge.

Thing 13 Voice thread

Very interesting application. Probably the most useful for me would be in my smaller classes. My first hour class is over 100 students, so a complete class assignment would probably not work so well; however, if I broke the ensemble into separate instrument sections and had each engage/comment on a video performance that might work.

For music theory courses I could see a class doing a diagnostic identification of compositional devices while looking [and listening] to a conductor's score/manuscript. Similarly, students could present their compositions and solicit critique and observation.

Thing 12 WIKIs

I was familiar with wikispaces from Bob Cox's 2009 class on WEB 2.0, in fact, I somehow was able to find my username & password to retrieve my account. In 2009 I began a wiki thinking it might be useful for at least one of the five classes which I instruct, but abandoned consideration as we entered deeper into responsibilities for classroom web pages.

I did not find Jason Welker's wetpaint sites terribly thrilling, but did encounter something potentially useful in his Economics class syllabus: a nice rubric for scoring student participation in a classroom wiki. So, for those looking for a framework on which to construct their own scoring rubric, you may consult his.


Scroll halfway down the course information page:

Welker's Economic Class Info

Windsurfing

Another one of my joys is windsurfing. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being hooked in and screaming across a lake or ocean.

Thing 11-Animoto

Reflecting on my experience with Animoto: it was simple to select material, and the software would "help" you and warn you if making a misstep. I did have a bit of difficulty downloading some video material from youtube, as the javascript code seemed difficult to get correct-but I finally did. Ultimately, I used a google chrome bookmarklet, and once I found the most recent code it worked fine. I enjoyed duplicating the video so I could select various 10 second segments, and I opted to have the background music I selected from Animoto fade out so the audio track for the video could be inserted as well.

Possible classroom use: Humanities field trip project where students create video displaying architectural features they have found from the scavenger list.

Thing 10 Creative Commons

As one who always keeps copyright in mind, and who has witnessed glaring violations every year in high school settings, I was interested to investigate the collaborative nature of music found within Creative Commons [CC]. The two videos expressed that CC allows the creator to exercise the usability/restrictions of their works, so I set out to randomly search for something I might like.

Of course, I started by using the search engine, and used "music" as the query. From the return list, I used the "Legal Music For Videos" category and a number of providers was displayed.

I selected the provider "beat pick", which allowed me to utilize their search engine. It was a very good filtering search engine that allowed the user to specify genre, tempo, etc. The search engine returned one hit from my very, very detailed query. It is an instrumental jazz work by composer Troy Kline titled "I Just Know It".

http://www.beatpick.com/license/useit/uname/TroyKline/s/i_just_know_it_instrumental

After listening to it I investigated the licensing menu, and it was interesting to see how the price fluctuated with the length of use that was selected. Obviously it was 100% rights reserved.

The second "avenue" I investigated was once again using CC search engine for music, but this time I selected "Music Communities". Again a list of providers was returned and I selected one titled "bandcamp" from San Francisco, CA. On their sidebar was a "browse by genre" option and I selected instrumental. 1007 pages were returned, and each page contained 40 albums/artists. LOTS of choices.

At any rate, I chose to investigate an album titled "Beats Vol. 3" by a group named
The Boomjacks. This album was released July 13, 2011, a very new release. Users can sort search engine results in bandcamp by most recent, most popular, and alphabetical.



Their music was protected as well, but downloads appeared to be very reasonable at $1 per track.

I appreciated that the search engine result also displayed other albums by the group when it was selected.

Overall, I think it is overwhelming to find exactly what you want-just so many possibilities.

Slideshow

Thing 9

Link to slideshow, which is playing above.

Slide show

The other two gadgets which I added were logos, and a subscription link. As Bob indicated-nothing philosophical here, just simple additions of available gadgets from the drop down menu.

Thing 8: Photo Sharing

I uploaded some travel photos, some of my garden harvest, and a running photo from a race.

my Flickr screen name is runwithtunes.


I have been a victim of a total computer crash which resulted in the loss [technician error at shop] of a couple thousand family photos. I do upload many now to a site to have a backup.

Establishing Flickr was very easy, as I already have a Yahoo ID. I did not know that Yahoo governed Flickr until I tried to establish an account and was asked for my password. Photo uploading was easy-as most of these type of sites are, and I applied the recommendation from the instructional video to add tags etc.

Possible educational setting uses: music groups have numerous performance & travel experiences which are great to document & share; music students audition for state and university honor group selection & publicizing these is not only good for record keeping, but also publicity and recruitment.

Thing 7: RSS Feeds & Google Reader

As other classmates have shared, Google Reader automatically had me as an account user and connected the blogs to which I had followed from week one of the course.

I subscribed to a running magazine feed, an endurance runner's blog, a St. Louis beer news feed, and allaboutjazz.

I subscribed to the classmate blogs of Hannah Fishburn, Shea Moore, and Kim Clausen.

The educational settings which I believe present possibilities: humanities students and jazz students can follow current composers & artists and get an inside view/updates to real people. Often times I believe there is a disconnect between those professionals and the consumers. They all have a story that we should investigate from time to time. Knowing the history behind the music makes it all the more meaningful IMO.

Thing 6: Twitter

My Twitter name is runwithtunes.


This is the early phase of the marching arts Drum Corps International competitive season that culminates the second week of August in Indianapolis. I have chosen to follow the host organization and two participating ensembles. The three Twitter names are: drumcorpsintl, scvanguard, and PhantomRegiment.

I am following classmate Amy Murray because we both love to cook, I however do not have a crush on Anthony Bourdain.......but I do follow him on FB and watch his show.

_________________________________________________________________________________

During summer 2009 I took Mr. Cox's Web 2.0 class and one of the "assignments" was utilization of Twitter. Unfortunately, it never allowed us to establish accounts while we were in the business lab at GHS-so it was pretty much a fail. That was my only opportunity for access, so I dropped interest.

Of course, many have "made their name" through the years with their posts, so I believe Twitter has a reputation these days. Could it be useful? I suppose in certain situations, yet I'm not yet convinced it provides anything quite unique that other web technologies cannot also provide.

I'll be interested to have the "inside" info from the two drum corps postings. I will be able to compare those posts to the information I seek daily regarding their activities & competitions throughout the competitive season.

Cloud Computing

I was somewhat familiar with Google.docs previously, as I was a student in Mr. Cox's Web 2.0 class two summers ago. I "follow" one document occasionally as yet another reference in the ongoing search for quality music literature programming ideas.


I have used "Thing 5" cloud computing already with my students as a survey tool. The two most often utilized surveys were devised to select end of the season Pep Band favorite tunes as well as Senior choices of literature which they have most enjoyed performing during their high school career. 


I enjoyed discovering the flexibility in sharing a pre-existing document with Bob Cox by simply editing the recipient list-which included one of our current "17 Things" class members!!

Social Bookmarking

Started a project on delicious.com that I hope will prove beneficial. When I began this profession a good number of years ago, it was relatively easy [if making a decent effort] to keep abreast of all the publishers of concert band music. It is now MUCH more diverse and keeping track is exponentially more time consuming.

So, I will attempt to utilize social bookmarking to assist in this professional task.

my delicious account username is the same as this blog name:

runwithtunes


Thus far, I have added 16 bookmarks & corresponding tags to help sort the publishers. One of the challenges has been that just using the tag 'band' does not distinguish my scholastic ensemble specific interest from any/all types of bands, so I have used the tag of concertband-but feel I might have difficulty finding others who have used the same tag. We shall see.

Here's a great video of Bobby McFerrin

He was on the panel at the World Science Festival.


http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html

Starting out

Well, first off a bit of introduction:


I teach instrumental music to 9th-12th graders; as well as Music Theory, AP Music Theory, and Humanities at Glenwood High School in Chatham IL


I have just completed my 25th year of public school teaching, and have also served on the music faculties at Monmouth College, Illinois College, MacMurray College, and Western Illinois University.


I am an avid long distance runner, with the marathon being my favorite distance. I have completed 20 thus far and have broken the 3 hour barrier at the Chicago Marathon in 2009 & 2010.


I love to train while listening to music.


I run with tunes.