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.