As a classroom teacher with a technology staff development history, I often heavily stress to other teachers that we don’t use technology in teaching simply for the sake of using technology. We should use technology to TRANSFORM our students’ learning.
An example from my own classroom:
Currently, my 4th and 5th grade students are setting poems about autumn to music they compose in small groups. We are learning about different types of scales (note patterns) in music and how the words of poems naturally have their own rhythm.
In a typical, non-tech lesson, I would distribute staff paper to my students (assigned to small groups), ask them to record the rhythms they discovered in their poems, and then creatively decide what the melody should sound like. They do have rules- they have to stay within the scales we’re learning about in class, and certain notes are more “important” within the scale than other notes. Other than that, they don’t really have any boundaries. After they finished, we would all sing the poems together, but I would probably have to play them on the piano first.
It’s a good lesson– they learn that there are many options for their melodies, and there isn’t one “right” answer. Additionally, they have problems to solve. Within their scales, the melodies have to flow together, and the end of the song has to sound like it’s “finished.”
To transform this lesson, I ask the small groups to continue this process using Apple’s GarageBand software. Students can input their melodies through multiple modes, and then play them back to listen and revise. There is immediate feedback about their choices for notes. Also through this method, they can choose nearly any instrument they want to hear play their melodies (not just me playing them on the piano). These are more problems to solve- what instrument would be the best to “tell the story” of their poems? After this option is set, they can then go into the instrument bank and add additional instruments to accompany their melodies.
Finally, we can save their final compositions and burn them to CD, send them to iTunes, or use them as background for a podcast. These students have taken a simple paper and pencil exercise that could be played and sung in a classroom setting and transformed it into something they can use again and again.
Do you have to be a music teacher to use a lesson like this? Absolutely not. What if your social studies class wants to record a podcast about this week’s topic of study? Some of your students might be writing the script, some might be the podcast recorders or producers, and some might compose the background music that is appropriate for this podcast.
What I love about teaching and learning with technology is that our lessons can become so much more than they were before, allowing students to make decisions, be creative, and find answers no one else knew existed.
What are you doing today to TRANSFORM your students’ learning?