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Music Teaching and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

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Music Teaching and Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

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Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy can easily be a challenge for students and teachers alike. This source focuses on linkages to the standards of The Arts - Music , and recent evolutions in Version 8.4 and 9 of the Australian Curriculum that push students towards higher-cognitive processes of Bloom's.

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When I learned Bloom's taxonomy as an undergraduate, I always thought that the arts were short changed. Sure, there was the affective domain, but it just didn't have the depth to it that the cognitive domain had, and the affective domain was often presented as a sort of afterthought. When the taxonomy was revised, this changed. Bloom's revised taxonomy is a more inclusive and complete model of how intellectual processes work for all subjects, including music. Because of this, Bloom's revised taxonomy is useful for writing lesson and unit objectives. In this post, I'll examine music tasks in relation to this taxonomy.

The revised Bloom's taxonomy has 6 levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and applying.

The levels increase in complexity from bottom to top. A major shortcoming of traditional teaching practice has been that too much attention was given to remembering and understanding, while students were asked to do relatively little at the upper four levels. The third level, applying, is really the gateway to relevant, meaningful, and lasting learning, because it is at this level that learning transitions from being abstract to practical; students can not only remember and explain, but they can also demonstrate and transfer learning to new situations and immediate needs.

Many teachers don't realize how much of their teacher is at the remembering level. For music teachers, songs, tonal and rhythm patterns, instrument fingerings, and defining musical terms are all remembering level tasks. Questions like, "what is the name of the whole note in the first measure?" or "what does crescendo mean?" are remembering questions. If a music teacher plays or sings a phrase of music and then asks the student to play it back the same way, that is also a remembering question as is practicing a passage over and over. These remembering tasks constitute a good deal of what students in music ensembles are asked to do. It is all remembering of fingerings, and repeating of a task until a level of competency is reached. Math teachers who give students pages of addition problems are also just asking students to remember. It is practicing something that has already been learned in order to get better at it. There is increased competency, but no new meaning is being learned, and no application of what is being practiced to a new situation is being attempted. If an objective for a lesson plan is that students will be able to play or sing a given passage of music with correct notes and rhythms, this is nothing more than a remembering objective.

So does this mean we shouldn't ask our students to practice? Certainly not. It does mean that we need to change what we expect them to do when they practice. I have written elsewhere about the importance of telling students why they are being asked to do a task; of students understanding the end to which a task is the means. Our subject here is different. Here we are interested in going beyond skill to reach meaning. The two phrases used in the understanding level that are of particular interest are "construct meaning" and "interpret." In a structural sense, we construct meaning out of the patterns and groupings we perceive when we listen to music. We generally have no trouble moving to the pulse of music, of grouping a sequence of musical notes into a rhythm pattern or melodic phrase, or of perceiving the difference between a waltz and a tango. In forming mental images of rhythmic, metric, and grouping structures, we are literally constructing meaning out of sounds. We are ascribing to what we hear an organization that enables us to make musical sense of the sounds by sorting them spatially and temporally. A student who is constructing meaning from music he or she is practicing might answer questions like, "what pulse do I perceive in the music?" "How many notes are contained within each pulse?" "How many beats or measures of music seem to go together before there is a natural break or pause, or before the pattern repeats? "At what tempo within the parameters of any tempo markings do I most enjoy playing this music?" "What can I do to bring out the qualities in this music that I enjoy so that others will notice them and enjoy the music as I do?" Answering these questions naturally leads into interpreting, which is taking meaning and performing in such a way that it is communicated or shared with listeners.

When a student has learned to answer questions like these, and to make constructing meaning and interpreting a priority for practice sessions, that student is then ready to operate at the application level. For example, once a student has learned to determine where the phrases and phrase boundaries are in one musical work by answering the question, "How many beats or measures of music seem to go together before there is a natural break or pause, or before the pattern repeats," they can answer the same question, looking for the same things in another piece of music. They can also use prior learning to solve problems that show up in new works. Perhaps the first work had a repeated or parallel phrase, as in the "Ode to Joy" melody, so finding the phrase boundary was a matter of finding where the repetition began. Now the new work doesn't have a repeated or parallel phrase, but instead it has a note longer than surrounding notes so that the music rhythmically pauses between phrases. Or perhaps the phrase ends on a cadence, or begins in a new register or at a contrasting dynamic. The student is still finding patterns, but the patterns are defined differently in the new work, so s/he must answer the question, "where is the boundary between phrases" by looking for different evidence.

Application has already led us somewhat into analyzing; finding the phrase structure and cadential points is surely analysis. In analysis, the student goes further, finding out how the various parts relate to each other. We find where the antecedent and where the consequent phrases are. We find where the tension builds and where it relaxes, and what rhythmic and tonal relationships make it so. We find parallel passages and learn in what ways they are similar, and we find contrasting themes and in what ways they are different. The results of all of this analysis get folded back into interpretation, as the performer makes phrases, contrasts and similarities clear to the audience, and brings the whole practice experience to a higher, deeper, more meaningful level as the student directs his or her attention and purpose to matters far beyond the learning of notes and rhythms.

Evaluation is part of the practice process. As music is practiced, what has just been done must be evaluated so that the next action is apparent. Interpretation as well as accuracy must be practiced, and so each attempt is evaluated for how well the intended interpretation was done, and how accurately the pitches and rhythms were performed.

At the top of the pyramid is creating. I think it's significant that creating is the highest level. We sometimes discount the creative process by throwing students into composing tasks without giving them substantial learning opportunities at applying, analyzing, and evaluating. If students spend most of their music time singing and playing instruments, then we must find ways for them to transfer what they have learned performing to creating. Taking melodies they are learning and asking them to change a rhythm or change the last note of the phrase so that the effect or intent changes are possible activities to this end. Evaluating music others have written, and then writing similar music is also a time-honored technique. Trying out alternative interpretations is still another. It is not realistic to expect students to create music "out of thin air." They must have the intellectual grounding from which the creative process can operate.

The top three levels of Bloom's revised taxonomy can easily be a challenge for students and teachers alike. The new national core arts standards are helpful, because much of the standards found therein push students to those higher taxonomy levels. Pushing our students there creates a surge of challenge and motivation that students and teachers who have been stuck at the lowest levels of the taxonomy need.
If you would like to read more on this subject, please follow this link to another article.

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Music Teaching and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

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When I learned Bloom's taxonomy as an undergraduate, I always thought that the arts were short changed. Sure, there was the affective domain, but it just didn't have the depth to it that the cognitive domain had, and the affective domain was often presented as a sort of afterthought.

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The Four Primary Areas that Blogging as Pedagogy supports, nominated by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano.

https://socialmediaforlearning.com/2014/10/25/why-you-need-to-consider-blogging-as-a-pedagogy-to-facilitate-learning/

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Online blogs as a reflective tool - the experience and support needs of a
group of international students in Higher Education

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Online blogs as a reflective tool - the experience and support needs of a
group of international students in Higher Education

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This research focuses on the use of online reflective blogging to enhance an undergraduate Level 6 Built Environment Integrated Project (IP) module and analyses the needs and issues of this form of learning for a final year block attendance cohort of 276 international (Malaysian) students at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU).

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Maps & Timelines, Infographics, Images, Tours, etc.

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Multimodal Composing in Classrooms Learning and Teaching for the Digital World

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Multimodal Composing in Classrooms Learning and Teaching for the Digital World

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Link to Learning Materials - Reflect on the messages in Chapter 1.

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Carlos R. Abril, & Brent M. Gault. (2016). Teaching General Music : Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints. Oxford University Press.

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SimpleMind is the world leader in cross-platform Mind Mapping tools

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Mind mapping helps you organize your thoughts, remember things and generate new ideas. We've created a beautiful, intuitive app, so you can mind map wherever you are and whenever you want.

MORE SimpleMind:
* SimpleMind for Android FULL version adds tons of productivity boosting features - available in Google Play
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○ place topics anywhere you want in the free layout
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SimpleMind is optimized for both phones and tablets. Some features are only available in more recent versions of Android.

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SimpleMind Lite - Mind Mapping - Apps on Google Play

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Mind mapping helps you organize your thoughts, remember things and generate new ideas. We've created a beautiful, intuitive app, so you can mind map wherever you are and whenever you want.

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Chapter 6. Learning With Digital Media and Technology in Hybrid Music Classrooms

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Chapter 6. Learning With Digital Media and Technology in Hybrid Music Classrooms

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This chapter explores intersections between technology, digital media, music, musicking, and education. At focus is the development of a hybrid approach that encompasses multifaceted ways that people enact musicianship in relation to and through digital media and technology. In the context of music education, a hybrid approach embraces overlaps, combinations, connections, and blurred lines among music and ways of being musical. It fosters classrooms that mix aspects of general music and ensembles; mobile devices and acoustic instruments; or music from multiple genres, eras, and cultures. The hybrid approach discussed in this chapter situates students’ learning and musical engagement in musical inquiry and projects. This approach is flexible enough to support students’ interests in particular musical foci in a manner that resists linear, sequential, or compartmentalized forms of instruction. The chapter provides a springboard for developing and facilitating learning environments that are comprehensive in scope and rich with possibilities.

VIEW AT:

https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAwMHh3d19fMTEwNzQxN19fQU41?sid=d54ab15e-697c-4e26-96f3-82ea26985a2e@redis&vid=4&format=EB&rid=1

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PBL Music Example - Create a Film Score to Mickey Mouse & The Haunted House.

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PBL Music Example - Create a Film Score to Mickey Mouse & The Haunted House.

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Excerpt from Blog: "Silent film accompanists would either improvise music from scratch, use a compilation of existing (often well-known) classical and theatre music themes, or they would use a combination of the both. Sometimes original music was composed especially for the movie, but that was not a common practice until the “talkies” came along in the 1930s."

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This is the Privacy Policy for the Midnight Music website located at www.midnightmusic.com ("Site").

The Site is operated by Midnight Music Pty Ltd ABN 87 619 652 603 ("Midnight Music" or "Company" or "we" or "us").

Midnight Music understands the importance of protecting your personal information and undertakes to adhere to this privacy policy at all times to ensure your personal information is effectively safeguarded.

Information you provide to us

The Site provides various places for users to provide information. We collect information that users provide by filling out forms on the Site, communicating with us via contact forms, responding to surveys, search queries on our search feature, providing comments or other feedback, providing information when ordering a product or service via the Site, and other circumstances where collecting personal information is reasonable and permitted by the Laws of the State of Victoria, Australia.

We use information you provide to us to deliver the requested product and/or service, to improve our overall performance, and to provide you with offers, promotions, and information.

Information we collect through automatic data collection technology

As you navigate through the Site, we may use automatic data collection technologies including Google Analytics to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns. This will generally include information about your location, your traffic pattern through our Site, and any communications between your computer and our Site. Among other things, we will collect data about the type of computer you use, your Internet connection, your IP address, your operating system, and your browser type.

The information we collect automatically is used for statistical data and will not include personal information. We use this data to improve our Site and our service offerings. To the extent that you voluntarily provide personal information to us, our systems will associate the automatically collected information with your personal information.

Use of cookies and pixels

Similar to other commercial websites, our Site utilises a standard technology called "cookies" and server logs to collect information about how our site is used. Information gathered through cookies and server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our site, and the websites visited just before and just after our own, as well as your IP address.

A cookie is a very small text document, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier. When you visit a website, that site's computer asks your computer for permission to store this file in a part of your hard drive specifically designated for cookies. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

The Company reserves the right to use technological equivalents of cookies, including social media pixels. These pixels allow social media sites to track visitors to outside websites so as to tailor advertising messages users see while visiting that social media website. The Company reserves the right to use these pixels in compliance with the policies of the various social media sites.

How we manage personal information

Midnight Music undertakes to take all commercially reasonable steps to ensure that all personal information collected by us is accurate, up-to-date, complete and stored securely. When your personal information is no longer required for the purposes which Midnight Music uses personal information, all commercially reasonable steps will be undertaken to securely destroy that information.

How your personal information will be used

We use personal information for purposes of presenting our Site and its contents to you, providing you with information, providing you with offers for products and services, providing you with information about your subscriptions and products, carrying out any contract between you and the Company, administering our business activities, providing customer service, and making available other items and services to our customers and prospective customers.
From time-to-time, we may use the information you provide to us to make you offers to purchase products and services provided by third parties in exchange for a commission to be paid to us by such third parties. Should you opt to take part in such promotions, the third parties will receive your information.

Disclosure of your information

Midnight Music considers personal information we collect about you to be confidential and will not disclose such information to third parties except in the following circumstances:

Where you have consented to your personal information being provided to a third party;

Where Midnight Music is required by law to disclose your information; and

Gaining access to your personal information held by Midnight Music

Except in circumstances where access to your personal information may be denied by the Privacy Act or other Law of the State of Victoria, Australia, your personal information will be provided to you upon request.

Visitors' General Data Protection Regulation rights

If you are within the European Union, you are entitled to certain information and have certain rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These include the following:

We will retain the any information you choose to provide to us until: (a) you ask us to delete the information; (b) we decide to cease using our existing data providers; or (c) the Company decides that the value in retaining the data is outweighed by the costs of retaining it.

You have the right to request access to your data that the Company stores and the rights to either rectify or erase your personal data.

You have the right to seek restrictions on the processing of your data.

You have the right to object to the processing of your data and the right to the portability of your data.

To the extent that you provided consent to the Company's processing of your personal data, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based upon consent that occurred prior to your withdrawal of consent.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority that has jurisdiction over issues related to the General Data Protection Regulation.

We require only the information that is reasonably required to enter into a contract with you. We will not require you to provide consent for any unnecessary processing as a condition of entering into a contract with us.

Contact us

Should you have any queries in relation to the above or require further information regarding the Privacy Policy please contact us:

Midnight Music Pty Ltd
PO Box 219
Glen Waverley
Victoria 3150
AUSTRALIA

Email address: support@midnightmusic.com

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Halloween Activity: Live Film Scoring With Elementary Students

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This is the Privacy Policy for the Midnight Music website located at www.midnightmusic.com ("Site"). The Site is operated by Midnight Music Pty Ltd ABN 87 619 652 603 ("Midnight Music" or "Company" or "we" or "us").

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The Futures of Learning - What kind of pedagogies for the 21st century_ - UNESCO Digital Library

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The Futures of Learning offers compelling arguments for transforming pedagogy to better support acquisition of twenty-first century skills. It specifically examines how to teach these skills, a consideration that is often largely overlooked.

"This paper, the third and last in a series on the Futures of Learning, explores pedagogies and learning environments that may contribute to the development and mastery of twenty-first century competencies and skills, and advance the quality of learning. "

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Chapter 15:  Teaching General Music in the Digital Age.

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Chapter 15:  Teaching General Music in the Digital Age.

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This chapter addresses secondary general music practices in the digital age. It provides theoretical arguments for why transmission practices in traditional schooling do not work adequately in the digital age. The dysfunctions of traditional schooling are then compared to the freedoms afforded through modern learning in the digital age, as it commonly occurs outside of schooling. Models presented include the hacking of a musical education through open sources in digital spaces and student empowerment and ownership of their own learning through optimization, customization, and collaboration of both content and approach.

https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAwMHh3d19fMTEwNzQxN19fQU41?sid=d54ab15e-697c-4e26-96f3-82ea26985a2e@redis&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1

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Teaching General Music _ Approaches, Issues, and ViewpointsChapter 15

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The best infographic maker options can help you present complex data in a simple yet striking visual form. Of course, you can create your own infographic from scratch - but that can be a huge undertaking. The best infographic makers make presenting data much simpler, with a range of flexible, customisable templates.

We've picked out a list of the best infographic makers. We've included both free and paid tools, and while many are are aimed at beginners, even these are often hugely capable tools. As part of our rigorous review process we've evaluated them according to their easy of use, flexibility and customisation options and value.

If you need some inspiration, just take a look at our collection of the best infographics. And if you do fancy creating your own infographic from scratch, take a look at our guide on how to download Photoshop.

The best infographic makers available now

The best infographic maker for social media

If you need to make infographics quickly and easily for social media, Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is one of the best tools around. It has over 10,000 templates to choose from and thousands of free license-free assets to smarten up your design. There's a basic free plan, but as our Creative Cloud Express review explains, you'll need a subscription to unlock all the many features available.

Creative Cloud Express can do a lot more than design just infographics, but it's the best tool that we've found for that purpose for social. It uses a drag-and-drop editor which is super simple to use. Search through the templates to get the one you want, and then start editing. You can add your own background, change the text, add an image, introduce an icon and include your own logo (if you have one). When done, the infographic maker lets you resize for your favourite social platform with a single click, then download (we recommend saving in cloud storage). Sit back and watch your infographic go viral. Get Adobe Creative Cloud now for Adobe's full suite of design apps.

02. Canva Infographic Tool

A brilliant video infographic maker

Canva is a powerful and easy-to-use online design tool that's suitable for all manner of creative tasks, from brochures to presentations and much more besides. It also offers users a vast library of images, icons, fonts and features to choose from.

It features a dedicated free infographic maker with hundreds of free design elements and fonts at your fingertips. There are many more premium elements that you can buy for $1. When we reviewed it, we found Canva benefited from being simple to use for all kinds of design work, including infographic creation. At the same time, it offers a good level of customisation for such an accessible tool.

See our full Canva review for more details.

03. Venngage

The best infographic maker for a dedicated tool

Reasons to buy

Reasons to avoid

Venngage is one of the most popular picks for those looking for a dedicated tool for making infographics. Our first two picks as the best infographic makers can be used for all kinds of design, whereas Venngage was created specifically infographics in mind (although it covers diagrams and reports and other such pieces too). Thanks to this specialisation it offers a vast number of creative templates for the purpose (more than 7,500, in fact).

It's super-easy to use thanks to a handy image search feature, which makes finding and adding images to your infographics a breeze. Though there's a massive range of features available, including font upload and the ability to export in Powerpoint and even interactive PDF, many of these are only available as part of a Business account (there's a big jump between what you get from a Premium account and the Business plan). However, there is also a fairly decent Free plan, and the Premium subscription gets you everything you need to create attractive infographics with a highly professional feel.

A good option for creating infographics quickly

The highly rated graphics tool Snappa is another one that we found super-easy to use, with pre-made templates galore and a library packed full of high-res images - over 4,000,000 to be exact. It lets you remove image backgrounds with a single click and has a range of text effects and graphics to drop in. You can even share to social direct from the program. There's a free plan (you can have one user, 6,000 templates and three downloads a month), and paid-for options from $10 per month offering more features.

05. Piktochart

A great infographic maker for beginners

If you're after an entry-level infographic maker, Piktochart takes out the legwork of designing an infographic by supplying you with easy to customise templates. Once you've uploaded your stats, you can tweak the layout and colour scheme. Given that infographics are an art form in and of themselves, and one that can be overwhelming at first, Piktochart is a great way to get to grips with the medium. There are various pricing options, including a free account that allows you to make up to five visuals, although you'll have to pay to get rid of the Piktochart watermark.

06. DesignCap

Another simple to use infographic maker

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The best infographic maker to use in 2023

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Our pick of the best premium and free infographic maker tools.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, share videos to express yourself and learn together in a safe space.

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FlipGrid - Useful for Performance Tasks or General Music Classroom Teaching

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FlipGrid - Useful for Performance Tasks or General Music Classroom Teaching

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Try Flipgrid. It allows you to pose questions, and your participants respond. It is available as a mobile app as well, which is convenient.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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Visible Thinking

At the core of Visible Thinking are practices that help make thinking visible: Thinking Routines loosely guide learners' thought processes and encourage active processing.

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Example of Digital Storytelling App: Sutori 

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Example of Digital Storytelling App: Sutori 

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https://www.sutori.com/en/story/teacher-tutorial--TyRfCRgfCyi2y3trphFMvJKi

Sutori is a collaborative tool for classrooms, ideal for multimedia assignments.

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Beethoven was a German composer and pianist born in the Classical Era and is one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music. He suffered hearing loss at a young age but kept composing.

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Most Relevant:

TeacherTube: This YouTube for teachers is an amazing resource for finding educationally-focused videos to share with your classroom. You can find videos uploaded by other teachers or share your own.

Edutopia: An awesome place to find learning ideas and resources, Edutopia has videos, blogs, and more, all sorted into grade levels.

YouTube EDU: A YouTube channel just for education, you can find primary and secondary education, university-level videos, and even lifelong learning.

Classroom Clips: Classroom Clips offers media for educators and students alike, including video and audio in a browseable format.

TED-Ed: From a site that’s long been known for big ideas, you’ll find TED-Ed, videos specifically designed to act as highly engaging and fun lessons.

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Bringing multimedia into the classroom is a great way to engage students in learning. Supplementing lessons, opening up new interests, and offering inspiration, online videos make for an incredible teaching tool. In 2010, we covered our favorite 100 video sites for educators, and we've now updated our list with more than 100 resources and more than 25 brand new entries.

Educational Video Collection

Specifically designed for education, these collections make it easy to find video learning resources.

1. TeacherTube: This YouTube for teachers is an amazing resource for finding educationally-focused videos to share with your classroom. You can find videos uploaded by other teachers or share your own.

2. Edutopia: An awesome place to find learning ideas and resources, Edutopia has videos, blogs, and more, all sorted into grade levels.

3. YouTube EDU: A YouTube channel just for education, you can find primary and secondary education, university-level videos, and even lifelong learning.

4. Classroom Clips: Classroom Clips offers media for educators and students alike, including video and audio in a browseable format.

5. neoK12: Find science videos and more for school kids in K-12 on neoK12.

6. OV Guide: Find education videos on this site, featuring author readings and instructional videos.

7. CosmoLearning: This free educational website has videos in 36 different academic subjects.

8. Google Educational Videos: Cool Cat Teacher offers this excellent tutorial for finding the best of Google's educational videos.

9. Brightstorm: On Brightstorm, students can find homework help in math and science, even test prep, too.

10. Explore.org: Explore.org shares live animal cams, films, educational channels, and more for your classroom to explore.

11. UWTV: Offered by the University of Washington, UWTV has videos in the arts, K-12, social sciences, health, and more.

12. Videolectures.net: With Videolectures.net, you'll get access to browseable lectures designed for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, offering videos in architecture, business, technology, and many more categories.

13. TED-Ed: From a site that's long been known for big ideas, you'll find TED-Ed, videos specifically designed to act as highly engaging and fun lessons.

14. Zane Education: Zane Education offers resources for visual learning, including the very popular on demand subtitled videos.

15. Backpack TV: In this educational video library, you'll find a special interest in math, science, and other academic subjects.

16. MentorMob: Featuring learning playlists, MentorMob is a great place to find lessons you want to teach.

17. Disney Educational Productions: This resource from Disney is a great place to find videos for students at the K-12 level.

General Video Collection

Network TV, inspiring talks, and more are all available in these collections. Check out special categories and searches to find videos that will work in your classroom.

Teacher Education

Featuring higher-level learning, these video sites are great resources for finding education that's fit for teachers.

1. Academic Earth: Learn about science, justice, economics, and more from some of the world's great universities. You can even earn a degree from this site!

2. Teacher Training Videos: Specifically created to teach educators, Teacher Training Videos is a great place to find online tutorials for technology in education.

3. Classroom 2.0: Check out Classroom 2.0′s videos to learn about Web 2.0, social media, and more.

4. Atomic Learning: Visit Atomic Learning to find resources for K-12 professional development.

5. iTunesU: Find university-level learning and more from iTunesU.

6. Videos for Professional Development: An excellent collection of professional development videos, Wesley Fryer's post shares some of the best teacher videos available.

7. Learner.org: Annenberg Learner offers excellent teacher professional development and classroom resources for just about every curriculum available.

8. MIT Open CourseWare: The leader in Open CourseWare, MIT has free lectures and videos in 2,100 courses.

Lesson Planning

Put together your lesson plans with the help of these useful video sites.

Science, Math, and Technology

You'll find special attention for STEM subjects on these video sites.

1. Green Energy TV: On Green Energy TV, you'll find learning resources and videos for the green movement, including a video version of the children's book Living Green: A Turtle's Quest for a Cleaner Planet.

2. BioInteractive: Find free videos and other resources for teaching "ahead of the textbook" from BioInteractive, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

3. ARKive: Share images and videos of the world's most endangered species with your students, thanks to ARKive. These wildlife films and photos are from some of the world's best filmmakers and photographers, sharing stunning images that everyone can appreciate.

4. MathTV: Students who need extra help with math can find support on MathTV. This site offers videos explaining everything from basic mathematics all the way to trigonometry and calculus.

5. The Science Network: Check out The Science Network, where you'll find the world's leading scientists explaining concepts including viruses and the birth of neurons.

6. PopTech: Bringing together a global community of innovators, PopTech has videos explaining economics, water, and plant-based fuels.

7. PsychCentral: Students can learn about what makes people tick through PsychCentral's brain and behavior videos.

8. How Stuff Works: The video channel from How Stuff Works offers an in-depth look at adventure, animals, food, science, and much more.

9. Science Stage: Find science videos, tutorials, courses, and more streaming knowledge on Science Stage.

10. Exploratorium TV: Allow students to explore science and beyond with Exploratorium TV's videos, webcasts, podcasts, and slideshows.

11. SciVee: SciVee makes science visible, allowing searchable video content on health, biology, and more.

12. The Futures Channel: Visit the Futures Channel to find educational videos and activities for hands-on, real world math and science in the classroom.

13. All Things Science: For just about any science video you can imagine, All Things Science has it, whether it's about life after death or space elevators.

14. ATETV: Check out Advanced Technological Education Television (ATETV) to find videos exploring careers in the field of technology.

History, Arts, and Social Sciences

Explore history and more in these interesting video collections.

1. The Kennedy Center: Find beautiful performances from The Kennedy Center's Performance Archive.

2. The Archaeology Channel: Students can explore human cultural heritage through streaming media on The Archaeology Channel.

3. Web of Stories: On Web of Stories, people share their life stories, including Stan Lee, writer, Mike Bayon, WWII veteran, and Donald Knuth, computer scientist.

4. Stephen Spielberg Film and Video Archive: In this archive, you'll find films and videos relating to the Holocaust, including the Nuremberg Trials and Hitler speeches.

5. Culture Catch: Students can tune into culture with Dusty Wright's Culture Catch.

6. Folkstreams: On Folkstream.net, a national preserve of documentary films about American roots cultures, you'll find the best of American folklore films.

7. Digital History: A project of the University of Houston, Digital History uses new technology, including video, to enhance teaching and research in history.

8. History Matters: Another university project, this one is from George Mason University. Sharing primary documents, images, audio, and more, there's plenty of historic multimedia to go around on this site.

9. Social Studies Video Dictionary: Make definitions visual with this video dictionary for social studies.

10. The Living Room Candidate: From the Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate features presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008.

11. Media Education Foundation: The Media Education Foundation offers documentary films and other challenging media for teaching media literacy and media studies.

Video Tools

Make it easy to find, share, and view videos with these tools.

Network and Program Videos

Check out these sites to find public broadcasting and other educational programs.

1. PBS Video: Watch and share PBS videos online with this site.

2. National Geographic: Find some of the world's most amazing videos of natural life on National Geographic's online video home.

3. NOVA Teachers: NOVA shares highly organized videos for teachers, with 1-3 hour programs divided into chapters, plus short 5-15 minute segments from NOVA scienceNOW.

4. Discovery Education: Use Discovery Education's videos to inspire curiosity, bringing the Discovery channel into your classroom.

5. C-SPAN Video Library: Find Congressional and other political programs and clips in this digital archive from C-SPAN.

6. NBC Learn: Check out NBC Learn to find excellent resources for learning from NBC, including the science behind just about everything from the summer Olympics to hockey.

7. History.com: Watch full episodes, clips, and videos from the History channel.

8. Biography: Get the true story behind peoples' lives from these videos from the Biography channel.

9. BBC Learning: BBC offers an excellent learning site, including learning resources for schools, parents, and teachers. One of BBC's most impressive resources is a live volcano conversation discussing the world's most active volcano in Hawaii.

Free Movies and Clips

Documentaries and other educational movies and clips are available on these sites.

1. Free Documentaries: On Free Documentaries, "the truth is free," with a variety of documentary films available for streaming. (Link unavailable.)

2. SnagFilms: On SnagFilms, you can watch free movies and documentaries online, with more than 3,000 available right now.

3. Top Documentary Films: Watch free documentaries online in this great collection of documentary movies.

4. TV Documentaries: This Australian site has excellent documentaries about child growth, historic events, and even animations about classical Greek mythology.

How-Tos

Satisfy students' desire for knowledge and hands-on learning by sharing how-to videos from these sites.

Government & Organizations

Offered as a service from government organizations and other groups, these are great places to find top-notch educational videos and often, historical treasures.
Image attribution from flickr user oggie tolosa

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Bringing multimedia into the classroom is a great way to engage students in learning. Supplementing lessons, opening up new interests, and offering inspiration, online videos make for an incredible teaching tool. In 2010, we covered our favorite 100 video sites for educators, and we've now updated our list with more than 100 resources and more than 25 brand new entries.

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What Is Bloom's Taxonomy? A Definition For Teachers.

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What Is Bloom's Taxonomy? A Definition For Teachers.

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Source Focus: Brief History Of Bloom’s Taxonomy Revisions, How Bloom’s Taxonomy Is Useful For Teachers, Bloom's Taxonomy is a Heirarchal Framework for Cognition and Learning.

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by TeachThought Staff

In one sentence, Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills that can, among countless other uses, help teachers teach, and students learn.

For example, Bloom's Taxonomy can be used to:

create assessments

frame discussions

plan lessons (see 249 Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking)

evaluate the complexity of assignments

design curriculum maps

develop online courses project-based learning (often through project-based learning ideas)

self-assessment

See How To Teach With Bloom's Taxonomy for more reading.

A Brief History Of Bloom's Taxonomy Revisions

Bloom's Taxonomy was created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, published as a kind of classification of learning outcomes and objectives that have, in the more than half-century since, been used for everything from framing digital tasks and evaluating apps to writing questions and assessments.

The original sequence of cognitive skills was Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The framework was revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, yielding the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. The most significant change to the Cognitive Domain was the removal of 'Synthesis' and the addition of 'Creation' as the highest level of Bloom's Taxonomy. And being at the highest level, the implication is that it's the most complex or demanding cognitive skill-or at least represents a kind of pinnacle for cognitive tasks.

See also 100 Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking

How Bloom's Taxonomy Is Useful For Teachers

In a separate post, we're going to cover exactly how Bloom's can be used by teachers. There are many reasons for the popularity of Bloom's Taxonomy (that likely deserve an article of their own to explore). For now, it's clear that many educators love Bloom's because, among other virtues, it gives them a way to think about their teaching-and the subsequent learning of their students.

As mentioned above, the framework can be used to create assessments, evaluate the complexity of assignments, increase the rigor of a lesson, simplify an activity to help personalize learning, design a summative assessment, plan project-based learning, frame a group discussion, and more. Because it simply provides an order for cognitive behaviors, it can be applied to almost anything. (You can see one example here-one of our teaching materials that combined Bloom's Taxonomy with common digital tasks.)

The image above visually demonstrates the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy to allow for room for the 'power verbs' that can act as synonyms (and thus activity ideas) for teachers planning lessons and units.

There are six levels in Bloom's Taxonomy (the initialism RUAAEC may be useful to recall the levels).

The 6 Levels of Bloom's Taxonomy

1. The first level is to Remember.

Example activities at the Remembering level: memorize a poem, recall state capitals, remember math formulas

2. The second level is to Understand.

Example activities at the Understanding level: organize the animal kingdom based on a given framework, illustrate the difference between a rectangle and a square, summarize the plot of a simple story

3. The third level is to Apply.

Example activities at the Application level: use a formula to solve a problem, select a design to meet a purpose, reconstruct the passage of a new law through a given government/system

4. The fourth level is to Analyze.

Example activities at the Analysis level: identify the 'parts of' democracy, explain how the steps of the scientific process work together, identify why a machine isn't working

5. The fifth level is to Evaluate.

Example activities at the Evaluation level: make a judgment regarding an ethical dilemma, interpret the significance of a given law of physics, illustrate the relative value of a technological innovation in a specific setting-a tool that helps recover topsoil farming, for example.

6. The sixth and highest level is to Create.

Example activities at the Creation level: design a new solution to an 'old' problem that honors/acknowledges the previous failures, delete the least useful arguments in a persuasive essay, write a poem based on a given theme and tone

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What Is Bloom's Taxonomy? A Definition For Teachers

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Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills that can, among countless other uses, help teachers teach and students learn.

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This source discusses SAMR, and the power of effective ICT intergration into learning. It discusses a few key questions:

How can my lesson be improved using technology?

How can I engage and empower students through technology?

How can online learning more closely resemble authentic, real-world learning?

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Good technology integration isn't about using the fanciest tool, it's about being aware of the range of options and picking the right strategy-or strategies-for the lesson at hand.

The biggest obstacle to teaching online probably isn't the technology. Teachers seek out educational technology, in fact, because it "can have considerable positive impacts on student performance," according to a 2016 study -improving test scores and allowing teachers to assess student achievement more efficiently. The big problem is how to integrate it: Beyond the sheer number of tech tools available, the same researchers identified "inadequate professional development and training" as the primary obstacle to using technology productively in classrooms.

Understandably, the emergence of the coronavirus has dramatically accelerated the process of integrating edtech, as educators around the country race to get online as fast as they can. But as many of our teachers have noted, the current state of K-12 online learning is more like triage-a form of crisis management-and not at all like skillfully managed distance education.

What's missing from the conversation right now, which makes sense given the immediacy of the need, is a focus on the bigger question of what the highest quality technology integration actually looks like. That's an important conversation to have, because in a post-coronavirus world there's likely to be a greater emphasis on digital learning, even as we return to physical schools and take advantage of face-to-face opportunities.

A Hierarchy of Tech Uses

A powerful conceptual tool to think about technology integration-and edtech's best uses-is the SAMR model, developed in 2010 by education researcher Ruben Puentedura, who was the 1991 recipient of a Phi Beta Kappa teaching award.

The SAMR model lays out four tiers of online learning, presented roughly in order of their sophistication and transformative power: substitution, augmentation, modification, and r edefinition. When switching to an online format, teachers often focus on the first two levels, which involve replacing traditional materials with digital ones: converting lessons and worksheets into PDFs and posting them online, or recording lectures on video and making them available for asynchronous learning, for example.
Creative Commons
Those are important steps, especially when teaching online for the first time, but in classrooms where tech integration has moved to the mastery level, the last two levels of the SAMR model-modification and redefinition-should also be in the mix. Students in classes where this kind of mastery is embedded find more novel and immersive uses for technology. They are creators and publishers of their own work across multiple forms of media, for example, or they are inviting professionals to provide feedback on their work products, or participating in digital forums with other peers around the world.

It's tempting to think of SAMR as a mountain to be summited. But good technology integration isn't about living at the top of the SAMR model; it's about being aware of the range of options and picking the right strategy-or strategies-for the lesson at hand.

Here's a closer look at good classroom practices at each level in the model:

Substitution

"Substitution" means replacing traditional activities and materials-like in-class lectures or paper worksheets-with digital versions. There is no substantial change to the content, just the way that it is delivered.

The goal here is to keep things simple: there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Scan your lessons and worksheets, convert them into PDFs, and post them online using Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, or a similar file-sharing service. Think about the information you have on your walls, such as the classroom norms, the daily schedule, or vocabulary lists, and convert them into digital formats that students can easily reference.

It may also help to provide synchronous as well as asynchronous versions of your lectures. If you're holding class meetings over a videoconferencing service like Zoom or Skype, provide a recording for students who can't attend. You can also create your own instructional videos for students to view at their own pace.

Augmentation

This level involves incorporating interactive digital enhancements and elements like comments, hyperlinks, or multimedia. The content remains unchanged, but students can now take advantage of digital features to enhance the lesson.

For example, students can create digital portfolios to create multimedia presentations, giving them more options to demonstrate their understanding of a topic. And instead of handing out paper quizzes, you can gamify your quizzes with tools like Socrative and Kahoot.

Teachers can also create virtual bulletin boards-using an app like Padlet -where students can post questions, links, and pictures.

Modification

At this level, teachers can think about using a learning management system like Google Classroom, Moodle, Schoology, or Canvas to handle the logistical aspects of running a classroom, like tracking grades, messaging students, creating a calendar, and posting assignments.

Teaching online opens up new channels of communication, many of which can help students who have traditionally been marginalized. Research shows that girls may be less likely to speak up in class, for example, so they may benefit from backchannels -alternative conversations that can run alongside instruction-that encourage participation.

Zoom's text chat feature, meanwhile, gives students an opportunity to write their questions out, which can feel less intrusive if there are dozens of students participating in the call. Also, students who prefer to collect their thoughts may benefit from slower-paced, asynchronous discussions in an online forum or email threads.

Redefinition

Learning is fundamentally transformed at the "redefinition" level, enabling activities that were previously impossible in the classroom.

For example, virtual pen pals can connect students to other parts of the world, whether it's with other students or experts in a field. Virtual field trips enable students to visit locations like the Amazon rainforest, the Louvre, or the Egyptian pyramids. After reading a book in class, you can invite the author to chat about their work and answer questions.

Technology also provides an opportunity to bring authentic audiences into your virtual classroom, and can make publishers out of your students. Kids can write their own wikis or blogs for public consumption and feedback-and platforms like Quadblogging can connect distant classrooms together so students both write and respond. Students can tackle local problems-like investigating the water quality of a nearby river-and invite members of the community to assess their digital proposals.

Going Beyond SAMR

Finally, consider how technology can be used not just as a way to deliver content, but also to strengthen relationships with your students. For elementary school teacher John Thomas, Seesaw and Flipgrid allow him to share a daily greeting, which his students then respond to-or to each other-with a typed or voiced comment. It's a good way to provide some stability while they're isolated.

How can my lesson be improved using technology?

How can I engage and empower students through technology?

How can online learning more closely resemble authentic, real-world learning?

Remember, again, that SAMR is sometimes thought of as a mountain to summit, but it's really more like a toolbox. The goal isn't to use the most sophisticated tool, but to find the right one for the job. More importantly, however, it's a way to reflect on your technology integration by thinking about a few key questions:

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A Powerful Model for Understanding Good Tech Integration

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Good technology integration isn't about using the fanciest tool, it's about being aware of the range of options and picking the right strategy-or strategies-for the lesson at hand.

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The SAMR Model as a Framework for Evaluating Learning

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The SAMR Model as a Framework for Evaluating Learning

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This paper reviews recent literature on Learning and provides examples with links to device use in classrooms of activities that fall within each of the four classifications of the SAMR Model.

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Reimagining Digital Learning - Linkage of Bloom's Taxonomy & SAMR Model

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Reimagining Digital Learning - Linkage of Bloom's Taxonomy & SAMR Model

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For teachers just starting out with educational technology, the task at hand can sometimes seem daunting. Even though tools such as the SAMR model can help, the plethora of choices available can prove paralyzing, frequently resulting in ongoing substitutive uses of the technology that block, rather than enable, more ambitious transformative goals.

The approach below is designed to help overcome this barrier, and is inspired in its form by Alexander's notion of Design Patterns -- a clearly structured solution to a recurring design problem -- which has been applied to education scenarios by Bergin et al. While it is not laid out exactly as a design pattern would be, it nonetheless provides a framework that a teacher could use in similar fashion.

The goal for the teacher is to construct a simple SAMR ladder that is coupled to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy -- i.e., as the task moves from lower to upper levels of the taxonomy, it also moves from lower to upper levels of SAMR. The two Enhancement levels of SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation) are associated with the three lower levels of Bloom (Remember, Understand, Apply), while the two Transformation levels of SAMR (Modification, Redefinition) are associated with the upper levels of Bloom (Analyze, Evaluate, Create). In turn, within each grouping a similar ordering occurs -- e.g., Remember-type tasks are primarily associated with S-level uses of the technology, Understand-type tasks are associated with either S- or A-level uses of the technology, and so on. The following diagram illustrates this association.

This coupling of the SAMR model and Bloom's Taxonomy has several desirable outcomes:

The already-familiar drive to reach the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy now also acts as a drive to reach the upper levels of SAMR;

The approach outlines a clear set of steps that help guide the introduction of technology in the classroom;

Finally, the approach helps avoid pitfalls of self deception -- i.e., assuming that a particular task is at a higher level in either the Bloom or SAMR sense than it actually is.

Avoid epic fails and get the most out of technology.

It is important to realize that this association between SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy is not a necessary -- or even habitual -- coupling. Thus, it is possible to use extremely powerful redefinition-level approaches to make certain types of memorization tasks possible; conversely, it is also possible to undertake novel create-type tasks that only make basic substitution/augmentation use of the technology. Additionally, far more complex couplings between SAMR and Bloom are possible, involving convergent/divergent branchings, oscillations between levels, skipping of some SAMR levels, etc. Nonetheless, the simple structure described above is well suited to beginning practitioners' needs, and even retains usefulness for more experienced faculty.

In addition to the integration of SAMR and Bloom described above, two more ingredients are necessary for the best results:

a clear motivation for the change -- the best results are obtained when a teacher has a strong reason for changing existing practice that is independent of the introduction of technology.

a clean app flow, designed to move through the tasks, that is as simple as possible, avoiding needless complexity -- e.g., in transferring work products from one app to the next.

Finally, let's look at an example of this approach in practice. In this example, we will set up a general pattern for math activities, where the motivating factor is to take math instruction from a mode where -- to use Richard Skemp's words -- instrumental understanding dominates (how) to a mode where relational understanding is primary (how and why). This shift in math instruction can be seen in changes in curricula worldwide, and is crucial to students' capacity to use -- and enjoy -- the math they have learned in the world outside the classroom. In the interest of making the example more tangible, the context will be a course in introductory statistics, although the general pattern is readily applicable to other math courses.

1. Substitution/Remember: Students use ebooks and other Open Education Resources to acquire basic knowledge about statistical tools and procedures.

2. Substitution/Understand: At the same time, they begin a process of gathering information online describing applications of these statistical tools to an area of interest to them, using simple bookmark aggregation services (e.g., Diigo, Delicious) to collect and tag these resources, relating them to the knowledge gained in 1.

3. Augmentation/Apply: Using a simple yet powerful tool for visualization like GeoGebra, students explore the concepts covered in the resources described in 1., and solve related standard problems. The scope and number of the problems is not governed by what is available in the "back of the book," but rather driven by the evolution of student understanding, as measured by suitable formative assessment processes.

4. Modification/Analyze: The students also apply similar problem-solving approaches to questions raised in the materials they found in 2. In doing so, they will reconstruct the reasoning of the original authors, and verify -- or disprove -- their conclusions.

5. Modification/Evaluate: Students now select a subset of the materials studied in 4. for further critique and/or development, using GeoGebra as their primary analysis tool. Via a blog, they explain this work to fellow students, and invite their feedback to refine both the clarity of their explanations and the focus of their work.

6. Redefinition/Create: Students refine their blog post into a short digital video project, with the goal that it will be used as part of instructional materials in subsequent years.

Photo " sky puzzle" by Jared Tarbell. Used under a CC BY 2.0 license.

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SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy: Assembling the Puzzle | Common Sense Education

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Find out how you can use technology to engage students in rich learning experiences.

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How to Apply the SAMR Model with Ruben Puentedura.

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How to Apply the SAMR Model with Ruben Puentedura.

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How to Apply the SAMR Model with Ruben Puentedura

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Leveraging Digital Pedagogy -  The Rochester Community School Approach

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Leveraging Digital Pedagogy -  The Rochester Community School Approach

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Rochester's publication discusses how students are becoming empowered learners, computational thinkers, innovative designers, knowledge constructors, creative communicators, global collaborators and digital citizens.

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Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

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Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

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https://serc.carleton.edu/econ/media/what.html

Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

What is Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

Why Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

How to Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning in Economics

Examples

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Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

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Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

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Developed by G. Dirk Mateer , Penn State University, with considerable help from Linda S. Ghent, Eastern Illinois University, Tod Porter, Youngstown State University and Ray Purdom, University of North Carolina at…

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In Australia, the integration of ICTs across the schooling system has become a priority. However, few educational applications fit well in Australian school settings in that they are not considered to be pedagogically appropriate by teachers. This can be attributed to a disconnection between theory for designing educational applications and theory relating to the application of technology in classrooms, as well as a lack of alignment between technology, the curriculum and pedagogy.

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The advantages of incorporating the case method in a fully lecture-based course are best understood as part of the bigger case for active learning techniques in general. A detailed discussion of the benefits of active learning approaches can be found on the active learning site, but it is useful to highlight some main components of the argument:

Active learning methods appeal to students in the affective domain, motivating them to engage with the material even when it is quite challenging

Students learn the material more deeply, and work with it at a higher level, when they are active generators rather than passive recipients of knowledge

Students retain more of the material they do than material they simply read, hear or see

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By Ann Velenchik Wellesley College

With considerable help from Pat Conway, Mike Hemesath, Eric Ribbens, and David Schodt

What is Teaching with the Case Method?

The case method combines two elements: the case itself and the discussion of that case. A teaching case is a rich narrative in which individuals or groups must make a decision or solve a problem. A teaching case is not a "case study" of the type used in academic research. Teaching cases provide information, but neither analysis nor conclusions. The analytical work of explaining the relationships among events in the case, identifying options, evaluating choices and predicting the effects of actions is the work done by students during the classroom discussion. Learn more about the Case Method

Why Teach with the Case Method?

In a case discussion, students "do" the work of the discipline, rather than watch or read about how it is done by others. By engaging in the case, students apply the concepts, techniques and methods of the discipline and improve their ability to apply them. Case discussions bring energy and excitement to the classroom, providing students with an opportunity to work with a range of evidence, and improving their ability to apply the vocabulary, theory and methods they have learned in the course. Learn more about teaching with Cases

How to Teach with the Case Method?

Case method teaching brings together three components: an appropriate case, students who are prepared to engage with the case material in a discussion, and an instructor who knows the case, has a plan for the discussion and is ready to deal with the unexpected. This section provides detailed instructions on how to develop each of these components. Learn how to teach with Cases

Teaching Economics with the Case Method

Learn about Economics-specific aspects of teaching with Cases

Case Examples
Browse the collection of teaching examples
References

Browse a list of references related to teaching with Cases

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pedagogic methods:problem solving:teaching with the case method

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higher education :undergraduate (lower division)

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By Ann Velenchik Wellesley College With considerable help from Pat Conway, Mike Hemesath, Eric Ribbens, and David Schodt The case method combines two elements: the case itself and the discussion of that case. A teaching case is a rich narrative in which individuals or groups must make a decision or solve a problem.

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Interactive Lecture Demonstrations for Active Learning.

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Interactive Lecture Demonstrations for Active Learning.

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Interactive Lecture Demonstrations use three steps in which students enact three steps. Effective interactive lecture demonstrations also require that instructors:

Identify a core concept that students will learn.

Chose a demonstration that will illustrate the core concept, ideally with an outcome different from student expectations.

Prepare written materials so that students can easily follow the prediction, experience and reflection steps.

1. Predict the outcome of the demonstration. Individually, and then with a partner, students explain to each other which of a set of possible outcomes is most likely to occur.

2. Experience the demonstration. Working in small groups, students conduct an experiment, take a survey, or work with data to determine whether their initial beliefs were confirmed (or not).

3. Reflect on the outcome. Students think about why they held their initial belief and in what ways the demonstration confirmed or contradicted this belief. After comparing these thoughts with other students, students individually prepare a written product on what was learned.

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Created by Dorothy Merritts, Robert Walter (Franklin & Marshall College), Bob MacKay (Clark College). Enhanced by Mark Maier with assistance from Rochelle Ruffer, Sue Stockly and Ronald Thornton

Interactive Lecture Demonstrations engage students in activities that confront their prior understanding of a core concept. The activity can be a classroom experiment, a survey, a simulation or an analysis of secondary data.

What is an Interactive Lecture Demonstration?

Interactive Lecture Demonstrations introduce a carefully scripted activity, creating a "time for telling" in a traditional lecture format. Because the activity causes students to confront their prior understanding of a core concept, students are ready to learn in a follow-up lecture. Interactive Lecture Demonstrations use three steps in which students:

1. Predict the outcome of the demonstration. Individually, and then with a partner, students explain to each other which of a set of possible outcomes is most likely to occur.

2. Experience the demonstration. Working in small groups, students conduct an experiment, take a survey, or work with data to determine whether their initial beliefs were confirmed (or not).

3. Reflect on the outcome. Students think about why they held their initial belief and in what ways the demonstration confirmed or contradicted this belief. After comparing these thoughts with other students, students individually prepare a written product on what was learned.

More on what is an Interactive Demonstration

Why Use Interactive Lecture Demonstrations

Research shows that students acquire significantly greater understanding of course material when traditional lectures are combined with interactive demonstrations. Each step in Interactive Demonstrations--Predict, Experience, Reflect--contributes to student learning. Prediction links new learning to prior understanding. The experience engages the student with compelling evidence. Reflection helps students identify and consolidate that they have learned.

More on why use interactive demonstrations

How to Use Interactive Lecture Demonstrations in Class

Effective interactive lecture demonstrations require that instructors:

Identify a core concept that students will learn.

Chose a demonstration that will illustrate the core concept, ideally with an outcome different from student expectations.

Prepare written materials so that students can easily follow the prediction, experience and reflection steps.

More on how to use Interactive Demonstrations in class

Examples of Interactive Lecture Demonstrations

Ready to use examples are available and can be browsed by topic.

References and Resources

References and Resources about Interactive Lecture Demonstrations

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higher education :undergraduate (lower division)

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Created by Dorothy Merritts, Robert Walter (Franklin & Marshall College), Bob MacKay (Clark College). Enhanced by Mark Maier with assistance from Rochelle Ruffer, Sue Stockly and Ronald Thornton Interactive Lecture Demonstrations engage students in activities that confront their prior understanding of a core concept.

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Problem-Solving as Media Resources for Active Learning

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Problem-Solving as Media Resources for Active Learning

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Research by mathematics educators Vidakovic (1997) and Vidakovic and Martin (2004)) shows that groups are able to solve problems more accurately than individuals working alone. Even when one member is more skilled, the collective group is able to correct errors that would remain unnoticed when the skilled problem solver works independently without explaining his or her procedure.

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Problem-solving exercises are of particular interest to economists because of the nature of the discipline. Research by mathematics educators Vidakovic (1997) and Vidakovic and Martin (2004)) shows that groups are able to solve problems more accurately than individuals working alone. Even when one member is more skilled, the collective group is able to correct errors that would remain unnoticed when the skilled problem solver works independently without explaining his or her procedure. In economics, Maier (2003a) used tape recordings of group work to show that students assist one another in the learning process, resolving relatively minor barriers to understanding that are difficult to deal with in a full class discussion because they are so varied and students are reluctant to articulate them. In small groups, economics students were quite good at discussing and correcting errors in vocabulary, historical events, mathematical procedures, and graphing techniques. (Maier, McGoldrick, Simkins, 2009)

While nearly all of the vast array of cooperative learning techniques can be modified to assist in the development of problem-solving skills, there are a subset that are particularly adept at meeting this goal.

Multiple groups are formed of 3 to 5 students. In the first session of the exercise, each group is provided a different problem affixed to the outside of an envelope. The group works to solve the provided problem until time is called.

At the end of the first session, groups place their answer in the envelope and pass it to the next group and in turn receive a new envelope with a different problem. The second session of the exercise requires groups to again answer a (now new to them) problem, but without looking at the solution already placed in the envelope. When time is called, the second group's solution is added to the envelope and it is passed on to the third group. In the final phase of the exercise, members of the group open the envelope containing two solutions, evaluate them, and then compile a final solution.

The reporting out component of the exercise can be structured informally, by asking if there are remaining questions associated with the solved problems, or more formally in which the final phase solution is reported to the group.

This process can be enhanced when each member of the group is assigned a particular role. Further, as few as three problems can be used to facilitate this exercise as groups are only provided a new problem at the start of each session, although more problems can be incorporated equal to the number of sessions associated with the exercise.

Three-Stay, One-Stray

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Problem-solving exercises are of particular interest to economists because of the nature of the discipline. Research by mathematics educators Vidakovic (1997) and Vidakovic and Martin (2004)) shows that groups are ...

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A Teacher's Guide to Visible Thinking Activities

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A Teacher's Guide to Visible Thinking Activities

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What are Thinking Routines?

Thinking routines teach students to make their ideas visible and accessible. This is done through a variety of graphic organisers which help structure ideation and reasoning. They are simple to use, yet powerful in impact.

The purpose of thinking routines is to promote a deeper understanding of content, and help students understand how they think and learn

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Extremely useful thinking routine in secondary classrooms that sparks a range of pedagogies that emerge from this approach. https://www.inquisitive.com/au/blog/visible-thinking/

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"Students are asked to write down or share with the class, their observations of what they see. Students then use their inferencing skills to decide what they think about their observations. Lastly, students are asked to wonder what else might be happening within or outside the stimulus."

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Lesson: Audio Listening Practices: Exploring Personal Experiences with Audio Texts

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Lesson: Audio Listening Practices: Exploring Personal Experiences with Audio Texts

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This lesson plan asks students to keep a daily diary that records how and when they listening to radio, music (e.g., songs on streaming services, podcasting), and other music broadcasting services. Students then analyze the details and compare their results to published reports on Australian radio listeners. They conclude by reflecting on their findings and writing a final statement on their audio literacy practices and interests.

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Audio Listening Practices: Exploring Personal Experiences with Audio Texts | Read Write Think

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Framework for mapping uses of video into desired learning outcomes.

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Beyond lecture capture: alternative ways of engaging with video in education

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An overview of the potential role of video in learning and teaching

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Learning Affordances of Video-Print Combinations

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Learning Affordances of Video-Print Combinations

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Practical Ed Tech Handbook - Video Projects

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Practical Ed Tech Handbook - Video Projects

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Richard Byrne's Handbook (Page 15) presents an excellent overview of types of video projects together with online tools and apps to create them.

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Outline of General Capabilities - Advice & Resources

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Outline of General Capabilities - Advice & Resources

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The Australian Curriculum has seven general capabilities:

Critical and creative thinking

Digital literacy

Ethical understanding

Intercultural understanding

Literacy

Numeracy

Personal and social capability.

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Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority

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The Australian Curriculum has seven general capabilities:

Critical and creative thinking

Digital literacy

Ethical understanding

Intercultural understanding

Literacy

Numeracy

Personal and social capability.

The general capabilities play a significant role in the Australian Curriculum in equipping young Australians to live and work successfully in the 21st century.

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The Australian Curriculum has seven general capabilities: Critical and creative thinking Digital literacy Ethical understanding Intercultural understanding Literacy Numeracy Personal and social capability. The general capabilities play a significant role in the Australian Curriculum in equipping young Australians to live and work successfully in the 21st century.

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Planning to use General Capabilities for AT2

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Planning to use General Capabilities for AT2

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Curators of Professional Knowledge for Ourselves

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Curators of Professional Knowledge for Ourselves

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AT2 - Digital Pedagogy Links to General Capabiltity - Table Exemplar

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AT2 - Digital Pedagogy Links to General Capabiltity - Table Exemplar

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Topic 3: Digital vs. Traditional Classroom 

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Topic 3: Digital vs. Traditional Classroom 

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Kirschty Padlet - Top Draw Resources (padlet.com)

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Kirschty Padlet - Top Draw Resources (padlet.com)

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Celeste Miller Digital Resources (padlet.com)

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Celeste Miller Digital Resources (padlet.com)

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Rebecca Cumerford - Digital Resources (padlet.com)

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Rebecca Cumerford - Digital Resources (padlet.com)

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Inquiry Map that demonstrates the design process of digital storytelling and design effective media for investigation, planning, creation and evaluation.

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This resource is collated by an expert in the field. It includes a variety of resources on - DIGITAL STORYTELLING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM - DIGITAL STORYTELLING TOOLS - etc. Links are made to classroom practice, assessment and research, the standards, with tools for planning, creating/hosting, and producing.

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A support page for the presentation Digital Storytelling meets the CCSS

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PBL embraces principles of good learning and teaching, where the teacher acts as the fcailitator. This resources helps answer the question: "How would I think about designing a PBL course from scratch?"

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Study - Padlet, VoiceThread and Microsoft Teams in Tertiary. 

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Study - Padlet, VoiceThread and Microsoft Teams in Tertiary. 

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In this article, three technologies implemented in Master of TESOL university online courses are presented and explored with regards to their enhancement of learning: Padlet, VoiceThread (video recordings) and Microsoft Teams (chat forum).

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation

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Mr George Papagiannis Chief, Media Services at UNESCO and co-author, Julie Posetti to discuss media developments in the last few years that have placed digital data collection and source credibility under fire. A range of factors are transforming the quality, impact and reliability of online content, including:

Disinformation: Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country.

Misinformation: Information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm.

Mal-information: Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, social group, organisation or country.

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Journalism, ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation: A handbook for journalism education and training | Interview with Julie Posetti, Senior Research Fellow Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and co-author, along with Cherilyn... | By UNESCOFacebook

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Interview with Julie Posetti, Senior Research Fellow Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and co-author, along with Cherilyn...

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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Source: https://en.unesco.org/fightfakenews
Media Type: Electronic Paper

IBSN 978-92-3-100281-6

Topics: Journalism, Social media, Disinformation , Information literacy, Media education.

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We use cookies on this site to enhance your user experience. For more information on how we use cookies, read our privacy notice.

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 Problem-Based Learning in the Music Classroom

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 Problem-Based Learning in the Music Classroom

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This source focuses on three guiding questions in their study:

What prerequisite knowledge and skills are students expected to have?

What are the learning goals (both lower and higher) that students will be expected to achieve?

In what real-world situations would students apply this learning to solve a problem or create something new?

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I first encountered PBL as a graduate piano student, when my teacher circled a single note in a Bach Sinfonia and asked me to return next week to explain and defend how long the note should be held. To answer this question, I drew on my knowledge of Baroque articulation, counterpoint, and dissonance treatment. (I have since turned this question into a short PBL problem designed to introduce theory students to these topics.) While my teacher undoubtedly taught me how to articulate countless other notes over my course of study, it was this lesson that has had staying power far beyond all others. By engaging in a real problem and drawing on multiple sources of knowledge to find a solution, I learned not only how to articulate the note in question but many others as well.

PBL occurs when "learning is initiated by a posed problem, query, or puzzle that the learner wants to solve" ( Duch, Groh, and Allen 2001). As Boud and Feletti (1997) explain, PBL "is a way of conceiving of the curriculum as being centred upon key problems in professional practice." Typically, the questions posed in a PBL problem have no straightforward, easy answers. PBL questions challenge learners to acquire new knowledge and deeper understanding, to apply knowledge within new domains, and to see problems from a variety of perspectives.

This description should seem familiar, since addressing challenging questions is precisely what drives faculty research and learning. And yet, a persistent irony in higher education is that many teachers do not teach in the way that they themselves learn as professionals and scholars, substituting programmed instruction for methods that nourish inquisitive and critical thinking. PBL, by contrast, offers students a learning environment that is inquiry-driven, student-centered, experiential, and collaborative: an environment in which learning is relevant to real problems faced by students in the discipline and beyond. By cultivating curiosity and creative application of learning, PBL fosters lifelong and lifewide learning.

Faculty who have adopted PBL usually emphasize the educational objectives it supports, including higher-order cognition, relevance, retention of learning, and collaborative learning.

Higher-order Cognition. PBL promotes Bloom's higher-order cognition (i.e. evaluation, synthesis, creation) by situating the learning of knowledge and skills in contexts that require critical thinking and application. Adopting PBL brings conventional learning objectives (e.g. spelling secondary dominants, history of opera) into balance with the thinking and application skills that give course content leverage and relevance. Harold White connects the problem of overemphasizing course content with the influence of textbooks in higher education when he notes that some textbooks are "[s]o removed...from the practice of science that they convey the impression that science is a collection of facts and concepts rather than a powerful way to cultivate curiosity and learn about the natural world" ( White 2001a). When teachers see themselves as talking textbooks (see Peter Schubert's (2013) humorously candid account), education is further reduced to the transmission of knowledge and students to the containers that memorize and reproduce knowledge on quizzes, homework, and exams. PBL places students at the center of learning by requiring them to utilize disciplinary sources of knowledge critically and creatively to solve real-world problems. As the primary agents in their educational experience, students become independent learners who are adept at thinking through data, creating evidence-based arguments, and sorting through complex problems.

Relevance. Often, faculty are skeptical of PBL because they fear the method will diminish knowledge acquisition. ( Lieux 2001 and Bowe and Cowan 2004 provide evidence suggesting that knowledge acquisition between PBL and lecture-based classes is comparable.) No matter how well students learn basic content, this learning will not help them if they do not understand its pertinence to other areas of their musical lives. When learning is approached incrementally through programmed instruction, the relation of learning to everyday musical challenges only emerges gradually, if at all. Commenting on the standards of creativity, communication, and synthesis upheld by the NASM handbook, Anna Gawboy (2013) says "If we are to meet these standards, we must help students apply their knowledge in contexts that are relevant to their musical and professional development." PBL accomplishes this goal by starting with these contexts, such that learning is always directed toward and coordinated by the problems facing our students in their musical and professional lives, both currently and in the future. Using PBL helps our students see music courses like theory and history as a practice (and not as a collection of facts) that is directly relevant to the way they perform, perceive, and appreciate music.

Retention. Because PBL allows students to integrate the practice of theory and history into their overall practice of music, long-range retention of learning is significantly improved over fact-based pedagogical methods. In their meta-analysis of eight different studies, Strobel and van Barneveld (2009) conclude that PBL favors faculty and student satisfaction, long-range knowledge retention, development of performance skill sets, and mixed-knowledge retention over lecture-based courses, which consistently favor short-term knowledge retention. Albanese and Mitchell (1993) and Berkson (1993) show that students in PBL courses display skills associated with learning retention, including self-directed learning, problem solving, information gathering, self-evaluation techniques, and perceiving the meaning of their learning.

Collaborative Learning. PBL supports other important educational outcomes such as collaborative learning. By engaging in group-based PBL, students benefit from the opportunity to think about problems from different perspectives, to practice making arguments for their positions, and to see learning as community building. For more information about collaborative learning, see Barbara J. Millis (2010), Duch, Groh, and Allen (2001), and Schwartz, Mennin, and Webb (2001), each of whom provide useful suggestions for implementing, managing, facilitating, and assessing group work in a PBL classroom.

The higher-order learning objectives supported by PBL call for new approaches to student assessment and grading (see Kris Shaffer's suggestions in Part III). But before we can assess these learning objectives, they must be clearly communicated to the students alongside the traditional, curricular learning objectives that define our course syllabi. Harold White (2001a) and Vanessa Vega (2012) provide good options, including becoming intellectually independent learners, recognizing and confronting areas of personal ignorance, improving problem-solving skills, and learning to organize logical arguments based on evidence.

In Part II, Philip Duker provides some example PBL problems designed for music theory courses and comments on their implementation. The Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education at the University of Delaware offers a library of model PBL problems, many of which were written by early PBL pioneers. Duch, Groh, and Allen 2001 and Vega 2012 provide useful suggestions for transitioning from traditional pedagogy to PBL. As each of the above resources demonstrate, PBL is extraordinarily flexible in its application. Instructors can construct PBL problems and incorporate them into course schedules in a variety of ways. This process should be guided by three questions:

What prerequisite knowledge and skills are students expected to have?

What are the learning goals (both lower and higher) that students will be expected to achieve?

In what real-world situations would students apply this learning to solve a problem or create something new?

In my own teaching, I have had the greatest success by varying the type of PBL problem employed. Sometimes, the problems are short and focused, such as when students are asked to demonstrate that they have learned terminology. For example, students could be asked to report their own vocal range in terms of a common pitch-register designation system. Other problems can be complex and open-ended, such that no clear solution emerges (e.g. Phil Duker's "A day in the life of a forensic musicologist"). PBL problems can be situated in real, historical contexts, thereby encouraging students to consider how their learning is relevant to their musical practice in present and future professional situations. Another approach is to structure PBL problems around important scholarly articles of the discipline (see Harold White 2001a). This example problem modifies a pedagogical technique common to graduate courses by using an essay by Carl Schachter as a primer for learning music fundamentals. Students in lower-level theory and history courses who are introduced to core content through reading scholarly works benefit from the opportunity to see and criticize how content is used in practice, to place ideas in their historical and disciplinary contexts, and to be better prepared for upper-level seminars. Finally, faculty can use PBL to create collaborations between music students and those in other disciplines. Interdisciplinary and outreach-oriented PBL problems offer limitless opportunities to teach both students and the community the relevance of student learning to problems that lie far outside the walls of the classroom.

It is advisable that PBL be implemented slowly. PBL need not be utilized to the exclusion of all other teaching methods, but can be incorporated occasionally throughout the semester. Elizabeth G. Armstrong (1997) suggests ways to structure a hybrid PBL class that features both lecture and PBL lab activities. Instructors who already use flipped pedagogy may find PBL to be a productive use of class time: one that amplifies their role as facilitator and places student inquiry at the center of learning. Harold White 2001a suggests using PBL as a catalyst for short mini-lectures during class, given only when students arrive at a conceptual impasse. However the instructor balances PBL and traditional lecturing or other activities, the goal is to empower students to become self-directed learners. To this end, incorporating PBL invites instructors to become learning facilitators who guide students toward answers and are equally satisfied letting challenging problems go unresolved.

Three common impediments to PBL involve time management, student dissatisfaction, and institutional resistance. Time management is a concern brought to PBL by faculty who wonder how they can fit in a time-consuming activity into an already busy course schedule. As alluded to above, flipped pedagogy can relieve some of the time management concerns, providing students time in class to work on challenging problems that would not otherwise be suitable for homework. Nonetheless, adopting PBL invites serious reflection about educational priorities, including what content can be minimized or cut to allow time for students to develop problem-solving skills.

Resistance to PBL can also come from students and from the institution. Understandably, many students feel anxiety and discomfort when confronted with a problem to which there is no easy answer, and some students will inevitably voice their discomfort as a complaint (e.g. "the teacher is not teaching!" or "the instructor is only confusing us!"). When these complaints reach fellow faculty and administration, it is not unusual to hear similar concerns coming from multiple parties. To avoid these criticisms (and to respond to them when they occur), faculty adopting PBL are encouraged to explain to students and faculty alike that one goal of the course is to learn how to learn. The process of recognizing intellectual limits and overcoming deficiencies is never a comfortable one; as Kris Shaffer recently explained, it is a " productive discomfort" that allows students to change the way they experience music, learning, and life itself (for more, see Shaffer's Open Letter to my Students).

With my Bach Sinfonia in hand, I returned the following week to my piano lesson and explained that the circled note participated in a dissonance in the following measure and thus should be held long enough for the interval of resolution to be heard. My teacher responded positively but went on to lament how few students knew how to address the problem. Aside from teaching me the value and power of PBL, this first encounter continues to impress upon me the importance of teaching students the relevance and applicability of their learning in my class to their experiences outside it. The essays that follow provide models for achieving and assessing student progress toward these learning goals.

Part 2: Applying Problem-Based Learning, Philip Duker
Part 3: Assessing Problem-Based Learning, Kris Shaffer

This work is copyright ©2014 Daniel Stevens and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy

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I first encountered PBL as a graduate piano student, when my teacher circled a single note in a Bach Sinfonia and asked me to return next week to explain and defend how long the note should be held. To answer this question, I drew on my knowledge of Baroque articulation, counterpoint, and dissonance treatment.

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Applying Problem-Based Learning in the Music Theory Classroom

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Applying Problem-Based Learning in the Music Theory Classroom

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Example of Practice - In the two following examples, students are asked to analyze a piece of music, but they do so in order to develop support for an argument.

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"Frequently, commitment [to start using PBL] grows out of the recurring frustration most instructors experience when they realize how little their students understand or remember from a semester of charismatic lectures." (White 2001)

##Problem-based learning (PBL) in music theory classes

Designing a problem-based learning environment for a music theory class is a considerable undertaking that will often depart from more traditional methods of instruction. As Daniel Stevens discussed in Part I, adopting a PBL approach usually involves explicitly embracing broad liberal-arts course objectives (such as critical thinking and oral communication) in addition to content-focused ones (such as properly resolving the Neapolitan chord, or understanding the importance of Palestrina). There is often a concomitant shift from trying to "cover" all of the material that one thinks should ideally be discussed in a course to focusing on deeper engagement with fewer topics (see Alegant in this volume). This shift is often discussed in terms of the difference between teaching vs. learning (humorously encapsulated in this cartoon). How would these changes play out over the course of a semester and over a multi-term curriculum?

Although some instructors employ PBL as the exclusive learning approach for a particular course, many create hybrid classes that mix PBL exercises into more traditional learning environments. From my own experience, mixing in these kinds of problems can be quite successful within the structure of a more traditional class and serve as a refreshing change of pace for both teacher and students. In short, an instructor can freely experiment with this approach without committing to full-scale adoption.

One of the strengths of incorporating PBL approaches early in the course sequence is to engage students with higher-level thinking at the beginning of their theory study when many students are cognitively ready for difficult problems but lack mastery of some of the fundamental topics taught in music theory (such as: key signatures, meter, scales, intervals, chords, etc.). Furthermore, placing these introductory topics into a context where they are necessary to solve a problem can help with student motivation to learn the fundamentals. Savery (1999), for example, has documented that students' self-motivation to engage with course material increases in PBL and similar settings as compared with traditional lecture-based courses.

One challenge of adopting PBLs in the theory classroom can be a switch from individual to group work. While almost all PBL environments use student groups, it is possible to give PBL-inspired problems to individuals (I suggest one such problem below). Effectively using groups can leverage many positive benefits to learning; Allen, Duch, and Groh ( 2001) provide a number of helpful tips in regards to forming and managing groups. For long-term group work, having groups write and sign a set of ground rules can help tremendously in fostering success. Often instructors mandate certain rules (such as respecting the views, values, and ideas of other members), but then allow groups to come up with other rules on their own. The groups should also agree to penalties for not following rules. By having the groups come up with penalties and everyone in the group agreeing to these at the start, there is a shared sense of accountability.

##Designing PBL problems

What do successful PBL exercises look like for music theory classes? How can theory study relate to tangible problems that music students might have? Many in the PBL community (e.g. Duch 2001, Torp and Sage 2002, Hmelo-Silver 2004) emphasize that content should be introduced through "real-world problems," which are complicated, multi-disciplinary, and eschew a "correct" answer (e.g. Duch 1995 is a classic example in physics). The problems should be relevant and engaging (even if hypothetical); they should motivate students to invest in finding a solution.

Instructors should be clear on what their primary objectives are in a given problem and ensure that any specific content goals will be necessary to a solution. Problems often force students to not only wrestle with learning new content in order to solve a problem, but figuring out how to go about solving problems in the first place. This idea of students developing problem-solving strategies in addition to learning specific content is almost always an objective. After finishing a problem, many instructors share their learning objectives with the class to ensure that groups check and acknowledge what they have learned.

A common approach to designing problems begins by taking exercises or activities that students would normally do in a theory class and then trying to situate those activities in a more plausible context. In some cases, merely adjusting how an activity is framed can have dramatic consequences on student engagement. That said, when re-framing a typical theory task for a PBL exercise, instructors often incorporate higher order thinking skills as well. Problems often require students to go beyond a simple "plug and chug" strategy (e.g. showing students how to resolve a German 6th in C minor, and then asking them to write one in D minor) and instead ask them to make judgements, interpretations, or syntheses of previous information.

##Examples

The following are a series of examples organized by broad activity: analysis, part-writing and composition, and improvisation. In each case the problems should be taken as flexible models that could be altered and adapted to fit the desired learning goals of the course.

​1) Analysis

In the two following examples, students are asked to analyze a piece of music, but they do so in order to develop support for an argument. " It all sounds the same " is a PBL problem that could be used in introductory-level theory study. In this problem students have to make specific analytical observations using technical vocabulary, but they are motivated to do so in service of an argument. Also, the groups are encouraged to pick styles/genres of music that they are personally invested in, making the problem relevant. Note that the instructions focus on the process of creating arguments and using evidence as opposed to a particular solution or "correct" answer (i.e. it doesn't specify that one side should win the debate or whether anyone should be convinced at the end). In addition to constructing an argument and using evidence, a crucial learning goal is how to apply terms and technical vocabulary appropriate to music. The optional project that accompanies the problem provides a further enrichment activity by having the groups make a short video. As opposed to turning in a written paper, filming a dialogue provides opportunities for the students to have fun and be creative (you will likely get some comedic projects, which can be good if they follow the guidelines).

Another more formalized context for this kind of analysis problem, " A day in the life of a forensic musicologist," asks students to examine the technical details of particular pieces of music, this time in order to provide evidence in the case of a specific copyright dispute (variations would allow for the instructor to focus on pieces with relevant content, such as particular progressions or harmonies from Classical era compositions). Yet again, the students have to wrestle with abstract concepts such as what constitutes the identity of a piece, and make judgements about similarity and difference. In this problem, students also have to "re-compose" material in order to avoid claims of copying.

If the general strategy of the problems mentioned above involved analysis in service of an argument or debate, there are also many possibilities to relate analysis with performance. As Stevens's example, " How long should this note be held?," illustrates, students can discuss how issues of counterpoint impact a performer's interpretation of a passage. An instructor can also put students into the role of mentoring younger student who have questions about a piece, where insights into form and harmony can assist in various ways: " Help the high-schooler." This problem can be particularly effective for music education students, as it confronts them with potential situations that they might find themselves in. An instructor could also adapt this problem to address more fundamental skills such as note reading and key signatures. By putting students in the role of mentoring students who need the knowledge that they themselves are still acquiring, students can see the relevance of these basic skills.

​2) Part-writing and composition

While analysis is arguably an important tool to every music major, composition and part-writing exercises can be perceived by some students as having much less relevance to their future careers. One problem type that can be an incremental step in changing more traditional part writing exercises into something that is more relevant is " Missing measures! " In this problem, students are confronted with a situation where they need to make a passable continuation of a composition. The missing measures can resemble some of the typical exercises they might find in a theory workbook, but by rooting the problem in a particular style and instrumentation by a particular composer (instead of the abstract "common practice era"), students can understand how rudimentary exercises like completing a cadence or continuing a sequence are employed in compositions. This exercise could be assigned to individual students or used in a group settings.

For more advanced composition assignments, a problem that has potential for many variations is " The eccentric wedding request." Here students can be asked to compose short compositions to satisfy various unreasonable requests from a wedding planner. Importantly they must find creative ways to appease the demands of the planner while also keeping in mind appropriate stylistic markers in their composition (after all the bride will be paying attention).

​3) Improvisation

As Peter Schubert and others have shown, improvisation can be a wonderful element to bring into theory classes (see Schubert, Knyt, and Michaelsen for other discussions of improvisation activities in this volume). Group improvisation exercises could be set up with a problem such as " The impromptu performance." This has many potential variations depending on the level of the students, but it could encourage students to rely on various improvisational schema in order to accomplish a goal.

One of the remaining challenges of adopting PBL is how to assess student work, which includes not only the acquisition of content knowledge but also group processes and the achievement of higher-level learning goals. Kris Shaffer's Part III will deal with this issue, along with how to provide meaningful feedback and translate student assessment into course grades.

Part 1: Problem-Based Learning in the Music Classroom, A Rationale, Daniel Stevens
Part 3: Assessing Problem-Based Learning, Kris Shaffer

This work is copyright ⓒ2014 Philip Duker and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy

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Table of Contents Bibliography Contributors

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PBL: A Perfect Fit for K-12 Electronic Music Technology Education

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PBL: A Perfect Fit for K-12 Electronic Music Technology Education

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This resource includes discipline specific examples in music, stating that 'Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an excellent approach for K-12 electronic music technology education, as it addresses the unique needs and preferences of young learners' Other sub-sections include:

Leveraging K-12 Students' Experiences

Collaboration and Social Interaction

Intrinsic Motivation and Reflection

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PBL: A Perfect Fit for K-12 Electronic Music Technology Education

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Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an excellent approach for K-12 electronic music technology education, as it addresses the unique needs and preferences of young learners. PBL promotes curiosity, offers hands-on experiences, and fosters collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

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Relevance and Links to General Music Classroom

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Relevance and Links to General Music Classroom

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Project-based learning connects students to their learning in ways that traditional instruction often doesn't.

Here is an overview of the PBL, with the characteristics outlined.

Driving question: How do we create an entertaining score?

Entry event: Watching the video with the original soundtrack

Real/ world community connection: Students could Skype with a film composer or sound effects specialist, to discuss their process.

Integration: There is technology integration, as I embedded the videos into Schoology and had students log in to view the video. There is also science integration, as we discussed how different instruments, such as the thunder tube and rain stick, create sound.

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#42: Project-Based Learning in the Music room

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Music education ideas, activities, games, and songs | Technology tips for the music classroom | Resources for the elementary music room.

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Literature - Problem Based Learning as a Shared Musical Journey – Group Dynamics, Communication and Creativity

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Literature - Problem Based Learning as a Shared Musical Journey – Group Dynamics, Communication and Creativity

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Abstract Excerpt - The focus of this paper is how we can facilitate problem based learning (PBL) more

creatively. We take a closer look upon the connection between creative processes and

social communication in the PBL group including how difficulties in the social interplay

may hinder creativity....

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Inquiry based Learning in Elementary Music - Amy Deaton

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Inquiry based Learning in Elementary Music - Amy Deaton

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PBL in Music - Experiencing Music before Explanation. Students start creating their own meanings, before teachers fcilitate the connection to prior knowledge, and key-terms, or perceptions of 'problem' concepts.

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Inquiry based Learning in Elementary Music, Five Minute PD, Amy Deaton

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Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a tool which can be used by practitioners to promote thinking.

Source: https://highlandliteracy.com/reading-2/de-bonos-six-hats/

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A Western Sydney research project investigated the question, “What are the practices of pre-service teachers and experienced teachers of music in secondary schools that successfully engage their students with digital media?” The hypothesis underlying the project was that digital media offers school students opportunities, and has the potential to allow more self-paced, interactive and personalized learning.

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This paper examines the contribution of learning with the help of digital media to the quality of students` knowledge when getting acquainted with the basics of musical literacy in the  teaching of  Music Education.

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Digital Media in the Teaching of Music Education

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Digital Media in the Teaching of Music Education

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Making Music From Images

This little app converts an image into a song. Play around with the various inputs belows using different images!

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This is a guest post by Katherine Miller.

QR codes have so many different purposes in our lives.

This type of matrix barcode can hold any type of informationfrom games to listening activities, virtual classrooms or even just a website.

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This is a guest post by Katherine Miller. QR codes have so many different purposes in our lives. This type of matrix barcode can hold any type of information from grocery sales to recorded

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Royalty free music. Safe to use in all kinds of media like YouTube, Facebook and podcast episodes.

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Royalty free music and 'free to download' music - Free Music Archive

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Free Music Archive is your number 1 resource for royalty free music and 'free to download' music.

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Music - Online Free Images (Copyright Free)

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Music - Online Free Images (Copyright Free)

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20,000+ Best Music Images & Free HD Stock Photos - Pixabay

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Download & use free music stock photos in high resolution ✓ New free images everyday ✓ HD to 4K ✓ Best music pictures for all devices on Pixabay

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Interactive Augmented Reality Activity - Music Escape Room via QR Code

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Interactive Augmented Reality Activity - Music Escape Room via QR Code

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How to Create : https://youtu.be/jjKkmRdQ8ac

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This MUSIC ESCAPE ROOM activity is geared towards Middle and High School choir students with varying musical experience and ability. This activity is ideally completed in breakout rooms online in a remote setting, or in small groups in-person. Not recommended as an individual activity. Each group needs at least one device (more works well too), and access to the Google SLIDES and FORM.

This MUSIC ESCAPE ROOM is intended as a 45 minute activity. However, you can adjust the times on the Google FORM to meet the needs of your individual class.

This resource is available as a Google App download and PDF. The PDF links will "force a copy" of each document that you can add to your Google DRIVE. In order for the students to use the Google SLIDES, you must give them each a copy. This can be done through Google Classroom or your preferred Class Platform. Students must have access to edit the SLIDES in order to use them properly. The students do not need edit access for the Google FORM, so you will need to "send" them the FORM link to complete each lock. The FORM linked is the editable teacher link, not the student link.

Related Products

* CHOIR SUB PLANS No Prep Digital Interactive Choral Music Notebook BUNDLE

* CHOIR Video Scavenger Hunt Sub Plans for Digital Classrooms BUNDLE

* MUSIC Field Trip | New York City Virtual Music Field Trip | Digital SUB PLANS

* MUSIC THEORY Task Cards for Chrome Music Lab (Chrome Song Maker) BUNDLE

* SONGWRITING 101 | Music Composition Basics for Middle and High School {Editable}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What will I need to assign this resource to my students?

1. Access to the internet

2. A Google Drive Account

This resource works wonderfully with Google Classroom, but can also be used in Schoology, Canvas, and other platforms.
Why does TPT need access to my Google Drive account for this resource?
TPT will ONLY add the resource to your Google Drive, and will not be able to change anything in your Drive. This process ensures that you receive your own, individual copy of this resource.
How do I collect student work?
Your students will simply complete their own copies of the lesson and turn them into your platform (ie. Google Classroom).
This product is created for ease of use with Google Drive. However, all Google products can be downloaded as a Powerpoint or PDF if that is your preferred method of content delivery. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Customer Tips:
⭐ Would you like to earn TPT credit to use towards future purchases? Leave feedback! Each time you leave feedback for a purchased product, TPT gives you feedback credits that you use to lower the cost of your future purchases. I value your feedback!
⭐ Click the green star next to my store logo to become a follower and receive email updates about new products and sales.
Questions? Email me at SRStockton@gmail.com

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FREE MUSIC Escape Room | Digital Escape Room

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This MUSIC ESCAPE ROOM activity is geared towards Middle and High School choir students with varying musical experience and ability. This activity is ideally completed in breakout rooms online in a remote setting, or in small groups in-person. Not recommended as an individual activity. Each group...

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Demonstration of HP Reveal for AR Integration to Classroom

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Demonstration of HP Reveal for AR Integration to Classroom

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Augmented Reality For The Classroom. HP Reveal is a free app for iOS and Android devices that uses advanced image recognition to blend the real-world with rich interactive content, such as videos and animations, called “Auras”.

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Explores collection of learning resources created by Dr. Tammy Seneca and Stephanie Thompson related to the use of virtual reality in education and its potential benefits for students.

Additionally, Highlights the specific approach taken by West Baton Rouge Parish Schools in integrating virtual reality into their educational programs.

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Our ClassVR downloads provide a collection of whitepapers, videos and case studies on virtual reality in education - all of which are free to download.

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40 + Presentation & Powerpoint Alternatives For 2024

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40 + Presentation & Powerpoint Alternatives For 2024

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"If you want to build a business case for a Presentation & PowerPoint alternative in your company then here is a great resource."

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40+ Presentation & Powerpoint Alternatives For 2023

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Explore 40+ Presentation & PowerPoint alternatives for 2023. Discover fresh tools and enhance your visual storytelling.

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ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Using this online tool, students can organize, revise, and plan their writing, as well as take notes as they read and research

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Scaffolding of Appropriate Use of DeBono's Hats in Reflective Exemplar.

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DeBono's Six Hat's -Responding to Text (Novels)

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DeBono's Six Hat's -Responding to Text (Novels)

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Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students to create a tangible, useful, quality product/outcome to be shared with their world. 

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What is 'Authentic Learning' ?-Steve Revington

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What is 'Authentic Learning' ?-Steve Revington

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Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students to create a tangible, useful, quality product/outcome to be shared with their world. Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, or student selects their initiative, it is imperative to nurture and support the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side or an event manager, a facilitator that co-creates with their students. Processes become the predominant forces while skills, knowledge and behaviours are activated in real-world, relevant contexts.

Authentic learning is actualized learning. It is only when student initiatives are directed towards a genuine audience, beyond the classroom, that learning becomes truly activated. When learning initiatives are designed for initiatives that permeate the classroom walls, then lasting, transferrable learning begins to take hold. It can be achieved by going out to the community, by inviting a community audience into the school setting, or directing it towards an audience in the global, digital or electronic domain.

When relevant and meaningful learning initiatives are skilfully designed and implemented for a genuine audience, in a realistic context, then innate neurological receptors to learn are heightened. The closer learning is to real-life scenarios, the more optimal the learning experience will be.

Authentic learning engages all the senses allowing students to create a meaningful, useful, shared outcome. They are real life tasks, or simulated tasks, that provide the learner with opportunities to connect directly with a relevant world.

Instead of vicariously discussing topics and regurgitating information in a traditional industrial age modality, authentic learning provides a learner with support to achieve a tangible, useful, quality product worth sharing with an audience in their world. Instead of prioritizing the curriculum expectations and its contents over experience rich processes, authentic learning chooses fertile, student driven, community connected audiences to create experience rich products for and then strategically align relevant curricula connections to them. with our environment that creates experience

As Albert Einstein stated, "The only source of knowledge is the experience." Yes we are complex, intricately wired beings with a vast network of neuro-receptors that serve us on our unique journeys through life. Regardless of our analytical talents, physical prowess, perceptual abilities or health status, we all come with plethora of innate skills and deficits. It's only when we're exposed to opportunities to explore, engage, create, reflect, interact socially, emotionally and cognitively

exposure to Authentic learning emphasizes 'experience nurturing' that provides longer lasting, transferable skills to an individual. It is more relevant, motivational and personal.

Our greatest short coming in education these past years has been to ignore the brain research that is richly available to us that affirms that implementing multi-sensory activities, pursuing meaningful tasks, exploring a variety of skills with real world applications is optimal learning and that it needs to be practiced regularly.

A student sitting at a desk, taking notes and regurgitating curriculum content uses a minute amount of their potential. In general, students learn to sit quietly, respond in turn, follow instructions and complete tests for a control teacher. Without relevance, personal connection, multi-sensory engagement and purpose, content driven curricula begins to evaporate once the test has been taken. You remember studying for exams, cramming, finding memory cues and rote to consolidate information? Do you also remember how fast you started to forget those brain bytes once you left the exam room? If it's not relevant to you, it not lasting, transferrable learning. If learning is not based in the rich processes that only experiences can provide, it's static learning.

This classic, industrial age approach has been used since the mid 1870's to produce a work force to facilitate mass production lines that were to become prevalent in the next hundred years. That era ended in the 1980's if not before. If all we do is sit at a square table, with a square piece of paper, in a square room with departmentalized lessons and timetables, then what are our education systems really producing? Brain-based research shows that by using all senses it maximizes the learning experience. The key being - the experience!

Interacting, manipulating, exploring, collaborating, discussing openly and sharing for meaningful reasons while having ample time to nurture a greater depth of reasoning and creativity is optimal learning. It's learning that sticks. It's learning with roots!

In an authentic learning model the emphasis is to prioritize the processes over the content. It's about allowing students to pursue individual learning opportunities that are unique to their interests, through relevant, real life journeys. The emphasis isn't just about regurgitating content for a unit test, it's about developing a set of culminating skills sets, within a realistic timeline, using self-motivated, natural inquiry methods to create a useful product to be shared with a specific, meaningful audience. It's about engaging students into full fledged, multi-sensory contexts that nurture their learning experiences in significant, lasting ways.

More importantly, the learning journey that ensues is life altering as students are aligned to meaningful processes that nurture non-perishable skills rather than the short term memory exercises that a content driven curriculum demands. Don't get me wrong, content is important but when using an authentic learning approach content is recognized as it is properly intended to be - a portfolio of records, research, plans, lists, notes, reading, contacts, drafts and support information that will become the artifacts of the authentic journey.

With the advent of the internet, content is readily available to everyone. We can reference, cross reference, research any topic at rapid speeds and do it at any time when it's relevant for us. We can access it through mobiles, tablets or computers as we access information as it is needed and when it is needed. Is it still relevant for a teacher to predominately dispense content to students, then evaluate the regurgitation of that content given as the main assessment of a person's learning ability?

Authentic learning allows for students to demonstrate their skills through a series of unfolding learning processes with a definitive, quality product that they can actually demonstrate. At no time in history has information (content) been so readily available to the masses, but it's the synergy and processes of engagement that defines our human experience. That's where the real value in education lies. Students need purpose. They need to feel useful and be a valued part of a community. They need to feel connected and real-world contexts allow for these elements to be activated and groomed. By nurturing 'purpose' we are providing the channels for students to recognize their unique talents and see their inherent value in society. Thus, individual and community self-esteem becomes a priceless byproduct of a successful authentic learning initiative.

I believe that education systems must reevaluate the weighting of its' curricula as it must reflect a working balance between learning processes and properly aligned content? Remember, processes take time to learn but once they're consolidated they're impact lasts for a long time. Processes require skill sets that are developmentally prioritized and require skilled instructors to transfer these skills. If you want students to engage in deeper thinking opportunities, then time is one of the most valued commodities. Are education systems willing to forgo the number of content expectations in their curricula in favour of embracing processes that require more time commitment? Good teachers are quick to point out that their curricula covers so many topics and expectations that there isn't enough time to cover everything appropriately. The more topics, the more content and the more time it takes to cover everything in the curriculum, and mathematically it just doesn't work. The rules dictate how the game is played, so to cover every expectation educational systems rely on the "here's the information" and "here's the test" mode of education. It's an efficient way to deliver content quickly so that all expectations are lawfully covered. It's an over used exercise in short term memory skills and cognitive cueing tricks, but its not a fulfilling, meaningful way to learn. Unless students are immersed in relevant, multi-sensory activities with specific, audience directed outcomes and culminating skills sets, then what students are learning is not sticking.

With the recognition of STEM, STEAM, Maker education platforms in the past decade, it demonstrates a deeper appreciation and commitment to relevant processes. This is very promising!

The quality of research, subject knowledge, skill development, expert consultation, dedication and resourcefulness that goes into making a product is directly related to the quality outcome of that product.

Is It Authentic Learning or Not?

Remember, in true authentic learning an outcome designed to interact successfully with a community is the goal. When this happens a whole new layer of emotional, academic and skill set developments take place. There's a big difference between preparing a skit for some classmates verses a dramatic production for the public. There's a much larger personal investment required when a student becomes an ancient Egyptian tradesperson producing tools and wares, while working at a market stall to an interacting audience than holding up a Bristol board display and explaining ancient Egyptian information on it. Best of all, the student retains information from this type of multi-sensory, authentic learning experience longer because it's real, it's connected.

Authentic learning is not project-based learning nor is it constructivism. These models of education were designed within the classroom context. Although at times they stepped successfully into the world of authentic, and are extremely useful tools in moving closer to an authentic learning approach they are not authentic learning models. Authentic learning is intended to successfully interact with a community; by going out to interact with a community or the community coming into the student community to interact. That's why it's authentic! It's a quality outcome or product of significance that is intended for community consumption or betterment.

Kudos to those teachers who provide project-based, simulation, game-based learning opportunities, Maker, STEM and STEAM. These are significant, engaging initiatives that provide the best kind of classroom learning and education systems need more of you. They are fantastic opportunities in providing working instruction and to model inquiry method, team work and sound skill development. What I'm encouraging is to take the next step. Consider a project to be developed for real world applications beyond the school walls, for a viable audience. Not every time, but perhaps once in a school year attempt an authentic event. For those who have stepped into the realm of authentic you'll understand how this impacts everything. It will impact the initial discussions, the consultation, the refined skill sets, networking and the professional development a student and teacher requires.

Think about it. Every important, relevant thing a person requires to achieve a goal in life has a quality outcome or product attached to it with an intended audience. Pitching a business proposal requires an in depth presentation that reflects relevance, meaning and purpose. If it's backed by tangible proof, even better. A prototype of a new invention requires a quality, tested, working device or apparatus to gain support in the marketing world. An environmental assessment requires extensive research and impact studies of connected, like-situations from around the ecological world.

A grade five teacher once shared a wonderful collection of student written and recorded persuasive "Saving Energy" stories with me. They even designed CD covers in art lessons for their project. The work, learning and planning by teacher and student was tremendous. Upon being asked however, "What did you do with all that great work" she replied she'd listened to the CD in class and put the CD covers up on the bulletin board. This is a great example of integrated learning but it's not authentic learning.

By planning beyond the classroom, a whole new level of understanding and relevant learning takes place. What if the CDs were intended for sale at the nearest mall? Now, an in depth degree of consultation needs to be pursued. Mall managers, local radio stations, graphic designers, bar codes for selling, copyrights local recording studios and marketing experts will need to be considered. That's the major leap an educator needs to take to enter the realm of authentic learning. What if the recordings were uploaded onto a website and promoted to leaders of energy conservation intended to be used to educate the surrounding community on "Energy Saving"? What about an "Energy Saving in Our Homes" campaign within your community? These are only suggestions but with a little brainstorming and with the right people, it wouldn't be long until a list of exciting possibilities could be created. Why are they exciting possibilities? Because they're real, relevant and worthy!

One of the reasons I started to use the term "authentic learning" was that I recognized that the term "outcomes-based" education, William Spady's model which shared a number of characteristics, was being recognized mainly for it's outcome statements. His strategy of reforming an education system, built on students performing a hierarchy of skills was diluted down to the content-based, outcome statements. Again, it became more about the content than pursuing the meaningful journey of authentic education. It isn't hard to understand why this happened because that's how it would be perceived by policy makers who's successes were affirmed in a content driven system.

Authentic learning is not another edu-trend or buzz word. It is real life - real world education and when appropriately implemented it can provide optimal learning opportunities to all students. I have noticed that some educators are misrepresenting the term "authentic" to qualify their student's inferred learning. If learning is engaged solely in classroom settings, referencing real world examples only, it's vicarious learning, - it's not authentic learning. Authentic learning is relevant learning, activated in a real world context to a real world audience.

​If you've ever initiated a business or an organization, you'll have a far better understanding of the enormous work and planning an authentic learning event requires. As in real life - these initiatives take an enormous amount of time, dedication, consulting, flexibility, networking, research and communication to launch. Yes, to launch! Once the launch has been initiated, then the real work starts. As guide on the side, or project manager you're now having to coordinate, educate, coach, consult and communicate with your students and parents in shaping their successful roles while pursuing the larger goal of your signature event. As well, you're going to require some additional professional development directly connected to the skills required in your authentic initiative.

Creating a Signature Event

A signature event is when tangible product is shared with a genuine, relevant audience. For example; if your high school senior class planned to design, construct and test their solar cars, organizing a Solar Car Derby with a spectator audience at a nearby racetrack would be a worthwhile signature event.

To fully immerse the students in an authentic learning experience they would be expected to prepare for the event with community experts, consultants, parents, teacher colleagues and community leaders. The more the students participate in the organization of the event, the more ownership and pride the students will have towards the event.

By providing students with the opportunity to have input at all levels allows for the distribution of learning at all levels. If there are rules involved, then student representatives need to be part of the derby rules development, refinement and approval. Students will possess a better grasp of all aspects of the authentic event when they are personally connected to the complete journey.

While the signature event is being planned, the students are honing their knowledge and skills to create their own quality product to share. It all depends on the type of product being created that will dictate how much class time can be used to design and create their products.

This style of learning is labour intensive and time consuming but it is the most worthwhile education you can provide students. Once you've implemented an authentic event, or simulation, the impact on student development is remarkable. The great thing about authentic learning is, it's a context that allows for student's uniqueness to be highlighted. Whether it's a specific skill, academic or a social/behaviour issue, an authentic setting, appropriately implemented, provides a very rich personal growth setting.

This new, authentic learning approach, however, requires another breed of educator. An academic as well as a life skilled, co-creator. A real, "life" long learner with skill sets and experiences that can facilitate a creative, diverse, well structured, team-based, open-ended, criteria based and globally directed education program. Ask yourself if you're on the way down the enlightened authentic learning road? Are you working towards sharing a tangible product beyond the class or bringing the world into your schools either electronically or for real? The authentic experiences you provide your students is also the beginning of an unforgettable learning journey in your life.

The Tale of Two Lyres

Pictures of Quality Products (below)

I had just completed an authentic event, a Medieval Market Living Museum one April evening. It was the culmination of one and half months of preparation as the students demonstrated their personas (roles) as medieval trades people in medieval Coventry, UK. The students worked diligently away at their trades during this open house, all academic levels to their potential. Their goal was to create an authentic medieval trade persona, an authentic costume that reflected their trade role, an authentic working trade tool or product and a market stall to share their wares. The room was decorated with beautiful tapestries, murals, personalized heraldry banners and a large book display of the student's collective work/activity sheets carefully spiral bound.

In authentic learning paper collections are referred to as portfolios. These portfolios were carefully done and included an extensive variety of curriculum content and authentic learning preparation sheets. Spelling, creative writing, math, art, drama, technology, problem solving and reading comprehension work sheets were all included. Nearly five hundred visitors came through our themed room and only about ten people even looked through the spiraled bound unit booklets. They were clearly displayed, beautifully presented and featured eye pleasing, colorful covers.

Visitors were far more interested in interacting with the trades people, hearing their stories, watching them work, than reading the notes that helped them attain their goal. Really, it is this kind of instance that affirms the reality that content and paper curriculum isn't as important as we believe them to be. It's important, and it certainly has its place, but the applied knowledge is far more important. The doing consolidates all the learning that went into the event.

​Somewhere along the continuum of learning development the jot notes became more important than the tangible, meaningful applications of the education purpose itself. In the end, it's the applied demonstration that counts. "It's all in the doing".

Student Behaviours When Immersed in Authentic Learning

Is it realistic to think that authentic learning of this nature can be done, ongoing, throughout the school year? Of course it can and there are school's that engage in authentic approaches already. Maybe one day authentic learning may be the motis operandum of the majority of schools, but realistically not yet. With the current school classroom structures, resources, timetabling, standardized test demands, physical classroom limitations, administration directives and the plethora of curriculum expectations as they are, it's difficult to do.

If, however, an educator can attempt one or two authentic learning events in a school year then that's a fantastic start. At year's end you and your students won't regret it and it won't be long until you're looking forward to starting your next. There are different degrees of authentic learning events from simulations shared with your community to complete, real world integrations. Start small, then develop your authentic learning undertakings over the years to come. Let other educators, parents and community members observe your authentic learning events. Remember, a well implemented authentic unit/event is the best kind of promotion for this rich style of learning.

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Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students to create a tangible, useful, quality product/outcome to be shared with their world. Once an educator...

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Source: Moodle - Learning Materials - Topic 5 -  Authentic Learning. (New Basics: Queensland trials a curriculum for tomorrow)

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Ezette Grauf: Heuristics on Categories of Productive Pedagogies 

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Ezette Grauf: Heuristics on Categories of Productive Pedagogies 

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Source: http://authenticlearning.weebly.com/

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Student Behaviours When Immersed in Authentic Learning

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Student Behaviours When Immersed in Authentic Learning

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Source: http://authenticlearning.weebly.com/

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Source: http://authenticlearning.weebly.com/

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A report about the practices, processes, strategies
and structures that best promote ‘lifelong learning’
and the development of ‘lifelong learners’ in the
middle years of schooling

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Developing Lifelong Learners in Education - Pedagogy Review

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Developing Lifelong Learners in Education - Pedagogy Review

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PBL Music Example - Create a Film Score to Mickey Mouse & The Haunted House.

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PBL Music Example - Create a Film Score to Mickey Mouse & The Haunted House.

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Excerpt from Blog: "Rather than have the students compose a score and match it up to the video in a digital audio workstation like GarageBand or Mixcraft, she has the students perform the music live, along with the film while it’s being shown on a data projector."

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This is the Privacy Policy for the Midnight Music website located at www.midnightmusic.com ("Site").

The Site is operated by Midnight Music Pty Ltd ABN 87 619 652 603 ("Midnight Music" or "Company" or "we" or "us").

Midnight Music understands the importance of protecting your personal information and undertakes to adhere to this privacy policy at all times to ensure your personal information is effectively safeguarded.

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We use information you provide to us to deliver the requested product and/or service, to improve our overall performance, and to provide you with offers, promotions, and information.

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As you navigate through the Site, we may use automatic data collection technologies including Google Analytics to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns. This will generally include information about your location, your traffic pattern through our Site, and any communications between your computer and our Site. Among other things, we will collect data about the type of computer you use, your Internet connection, your IP address, your operating system, and your browser type.

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A cookie is a very small text document, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier. When you visit a website, that site's computer asks your computer for permission to store this file in a part of your hard drive specifically designated for cookies. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

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We use personal information for purposes of presenting our Site and its contents to you, providing you with information, providing you with offers for products and services, providing you with information about your subscriptions and products, carrying out any contract between you and the Company, administering our business activities, providing customer service, and making available other items and services to our customers and prospective customers.
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Gaining access to your personal information held by Midnight Music

Except in circumstances where access to your personal information may be denied by the Privacy Act or other Law of the State of Victoria, Australia, your personal information will be provided to you upon request.

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To the extent that you provided consent to the Company's processing of your personal data, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based upon consent that occurred prior to your withdrawal of consent.

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Halloween Activity: Live Film Scoring With Elementary Students

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This is the Privacy Policy for the Midnight Music website located at www.midnightmusic.com ("Site"). The Site is operated by Midnight Music Pty Ltd ABN 87 619 652 603 ("Midnight Music" or "Company" or "we" or "us").

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Ethics and Legality of Film Scoring Mickey Mouse - Creative Commons Liscence and Public Domain.

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Ethics and Legality of Film Scoring Mickey Mouse - Creative Commons Liscence and Public Domain.

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The copyright for the original animated version of Mickey Mouse - including Steamboat Wille, expired on January 1, 2024 and entered the Public Domain. Therefore, it is legal to create new creative works based on associated content, without authorization from the copyright holders.

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As the ball dropped over Times Square last night, all copyrighted works published in 1923 fell into the public domain (with a few exceptions). Everyone now has the right to republish them or adapt them for use in new works.

It's the first time this has happened in 21 years.

In 1998, works published in 1922 or earlier were in the public domain, with 1923 works scheduled to expire at the beginning of 1999. But then Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It added 20 years to the terms of older works, keeping 1923 works locked up until 2019.

Many people-including me-expected another fight over copyright extension in 2018. But it never happened. Congress left the existing law in place, and so those 1923 copyrights expired on schedule this morning.

And assuming Congress doesn't interfere, more works will fall into the public domain each January from now on.

Next January, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue will fall into the public domain. It will be followed by The Great Gatsby in January 2021 and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in January 2022.

On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie -and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse. The copyrights to Superman, Batman, Disney's Snow White, and early Looney Tunes characters will all fall into the public domain between 2031 and 2035.

The expiration of copyrights for characters like Mickey Mouse and Batman will raise tricky new legal questions. After 2024, Disney won't have any copyright protection for Mickey's original incarnation. But Disney will still own copyrights for later incarnations of the character-and it will also own Mickey-related trademarks.

James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at Cornell Law School, tells Ars that this is an uncharted area of law because licensing practices for modern characters are "so much more intensive and so much more comprehensive now" than in the 1920s and 1930s. "We never had megacharacters in the same way" prior to the 1920s, he says.

Internet activism made another extension untenable

Dennis Karjala was a law professor who helped lead the doomed resistance to the 1998 extension. He passed away in 2017, but when I interviewed him in 2013, he told me that it was "basically the Gershwin family trust, grandchildren of Oscar Hammerstein, Disney, others of that ilk" who pushed for ever-longer copyright terms.

Most copyrighted works become commercially worthless within a decade or two. But a small minority of famous works from the 1920s and 1930s were still generating significant revenues in the 1990s. Retroactively extending copyright terms meant an enormous windfall for the companies and families that owned the copyrights.

"There was not a single argument that actually can stand up to any kind of reasonable analysis," Karjala said. But the public domain had few defenders. So even though the arguments for longer copyright terms weren't very strong, they won the day in Congress.

Until recently, I assumed that the same interest groups would try to extend copyright terms again in 2018. But the political climate for copyright legislation has changed radically over the last 20 years.

A year ago, Ars Technica broke the news that three of the nation's most powerful rights holder groups in the country, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Authors Guild, were not even going to try to pass legislation extending copyrights.

"It's not something we are pursuing," an RIAA spokesman told me.

The reason was simple, Grimmelmann argues: they knew they weren't going to win.

"There's now a well-organized, grassroots lobby against copyright expansion," Grimmelmann tells Ars. "There are large business interests now on the anti-expansion side. Also a wide popular movement that they can tie it into."

The rise of the Internet and its remix culture means that a lot of people now benefit from a growing public domain in ways that weren't true in 1998. That includes big companies like Google, but it also includes grassroots communities like Wikipedia editors and Reddit users. This emerging copyright reform coalition flexed its lobbying muscles in 2012 when it overwhelmingly defeated an Internet filtering bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

So if the usual suspects had pushed for another copyright extension, they would have had a serious fight on their hands. Digital rights groups, online activists, and lobbyists from big technology companies would have swarmed Capitol Hill, making the case against copyright extension. Evidently, major rights holders didn't have the stomach for another battle like that.

Of course, it's possible they could make another effort in the future. But such an effort would face long odds: today's opponents of copyright extensions are vastly better organized and better funded than the ragtag band that tried to stop the 1998 copyright extension.

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Mickey Mouse will be public domain soon-here's what that means

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The Internet stopped another copyright extension without firing a shot.

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I think a lot of people view silent-era cartoons as a footnote in animation history. I've certainly made that mistake in the past. But a brief glance over the treasure trove of animation produced in 1926 reveals a level of creativity that is truly staggering.

For starters, take a look at this clip from the hilarious and underrated 1926 Max Fleischer cartoon It's the Cats (newly restored by Thunderbean Animation) which combines animation, live-action, puppetry, stop-motion, and everything else to create a wacky climax unlike any you've ever seen:

One of the best films of 1926 is the visually stunning fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the earliest surviving animated feature (released over a decade before Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Pioneering female animator Lotte Reiniger crafted the film using silhouette animation techniques that are still inspiring. Just look at the ornate detail of the sets and expressive movements of the shadow puppets, which Reiniger created almost entirely by herself at 24 frames per second:

Felix the Cat, the first bona fide animated cartoon star, was the most popular cartoon character in the world in 1926. Producer Pat Sullivan took all the credit, but the real genius behind Felix was Otto Messmer, who was anonymously writing, directing, and animating the cartoons that Sullivan put his name to (Messmer also wrote and drew the daily newspaper strip, which Sullivan signed). It was Messmer's creative personality that gave life to Felix, and his films are full of reality-bending pleasures like this one from Two-Lip Time:

The other famous cartoon cat of the era was Krazy Kat, loosely based on George Herriman's comic strip masterpiece. The mid-'20s Krazys were animated by Bill Nolan, who doesn't get enough love these days considering he created rubber hose animation, which has had a recent resurgence thanks to Cuphead. Just look at the restless, elastic energy in this Bill Nolan scene from Scents and Nonsense (from Tommy José Stathes' collection):

The most inventive cartoons of the 1920s were the Out of the Inkwell shorts from Max Fleischer, who later produced the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. The series starred Ko-Ko the Clown and his dog Fitz, who would frequently jump off the drawing board into the real world. The demented finale to the classic Ko-Ko the Convict is a must-see. This thing just keeps topping itself in visual insanity:

Max Fleischer created the Out of the Inkwell series to show off his invention, the rotoscope, which allowed animation to be traced from live-action footage. By 1926, however, Ko-Ko had been given a heavily caricatured redesign by Dick Huemer and the studio relied less on rotoscoping in favor of wonderful only-in-a-cartoon gags like this one from Ko-Ko Hot After It:

The Fleischer studio still found special occasions to pull out the old rotoscope, as in this eye-popping bit from Ko-Ko's Queen. Note that the crew had to build a giant tabletop set just to make this scene work:

Another series that cleverly combined live-action and animation was Walter Lantz's Hot Dog cartoons, which began in 1926 and starred Pete the Pup (not to be confused with Lantz's 1932 creation Pooch the Pup... this will all be on the test). That's Walter Lantz himself getting blown to kingdom come in this clip from Pete's Haunted House:

Walt Disney puzzled a lot of people when he said, as late as 1930, that "my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop's Fables series." Paul Terry's work is usually considered lower-tier among golden age cartoon fans, but it's easy to see why his silent Fables were crowd-pleasers. This bit from Hunting in 1950, starring the long-suffering Farmer Al Falfa, is sharper and funnier than many of Terry's sound films.

Speaking of Walt Disney, we're a little way off from Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but there are plenty of proto-Mickey rodents scampering around in Disney's Alice Comedies, with Alice's Brown Derby being a top-notch example:

Even at this early stage, you can see Disney flirting with a vestigial form of character animation. This great scene from Alice Helps the Romance gets laughs from acting nuances, something Disney would expand on in the 1930s:

On the flip side, these early Disney cartoons differ slightly from the studio's later work in their blunt and callous sense of humor. Alice's Orphan is particularly cynical:

Some of the silent Disney cartoons are downright morbid. The bizarre Alice's Mysterious Mystery concerns a dog-killing operation run by cloaked villains that evoke the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was at the height of its influence in the 1920s, so I wonder what the reaction was to this expressly negative depiction of the group.

Similarly gruesome is the Mutt and Jeff short Dog Gone, where Jeff dons a dog suit to win some prize money at the dog show (the dumbest and therefore funniest get-rich-quick scheme in film history) and nearly gets ground into sausage links. This is truly sick stuff, but really, really funny. Imagine trying to pitch this to a network today:

The Mutt and Jeff cartoons, based on Bud Fisher's comic strip, are sadly underrated, probably because so few survive out of the 292(!) films produced. Playing with Fire delivers one hilarious joke after another, and ends on this all-timer of a sight gag:

Another incredibly creative joke, from Lots of Water. I don't recall ever seeing another gag like this in all of the 96 years since this cartoon came out:

Fleischer veteran Dick Huemer directed the Mutt and Jeff cartoons of the 1925/26 series, and some of the dark imagination of the Fleischer cartoons found its way into the films. The wonderfully spooky Slick Sleuths features a transformative shadowy character named The Phantom, who has so many creative possibilities he could helm his own animated series. Maybe that can still happen now that the film is in the public domain.

Charley Bowers, a director on the Mutt and Jeff series, might've been the first animator to make the switch to live-action filmmaking. His jaw-dropping films, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, combine Chaplin-esque slapstick with crazy stop-motion effects to create surreal visual fireworks. This guy was way ahead of his time, as evidenced in Egged On:

This bit from Charley Bowers' Now You Tell One seems like it should be a meme:

The oldest existing clay-animated film (later dubbed "claymation" by Will Vinton) is 1926's Long Live the Bull! by Chinese-American animator Joseph Sunn. This series was called Ralph Wolfe's Mud Stuff, suggesting that the figures were supposed to look like mud come to life:

For anime fans, A Story of Tobacco is a fascinating early Japanese animated short by Noburō Ōfuji, which takes a cue from the Out of the Inkwell cartoons, only using paper cut-outs instead of traditional cel animation:

And outside of traditional narrative film, German artist Hans Richter was one of the first to experiment with abstract animation. His 1926 film Filmstudie uses mixed media to create a bizarre dadaist nightmare with floating eyeballs:

Watching these 1926 cartoons, it's interesting to see the larger culture reflected in them. Flappers are an iconic element of the Roaring Twenties, and "vamps" show up all over the place in cartoons of the time, most notably Felix the Cat Busts a Bubble:

And even though these cartoons are silent, they make it clear they were produced in the Jazz Age. One character does the Charleston in Disney's Alice Helps the Romance, a dance craze that was at the height of its popularity in 1926:

In some cases, details pop up that you wouldn't expect to see in films this old. I certainly wasn't prepared to see the word "swag" show up in Felix the Cat Hunts the Hunter:

And lastly, 1926 arguably saw the release of the first cartoon with synchronized sound: Max Fleischer's bouncing ball sing-along short My Old Kentucky Home. Many of these Song Car-Tunes were reissued with sound in 1929 by Alfred Weiss, so it's possible that the animation of the talking dog was added for the re-release. If this is truly from 1926, it's the first spoken dialogue in animation history. If it's from 1929, it's still one of the first. Either way, the grotesque lip sync is highly amusing:
Some of the restorations featured here are by Steve Stanchfield at Thunderbean Animation, Tommy José Stathes of the Stathes Archive, and maxfleischercartoons.com.

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Hundreds Of Cartoons From 1926 Have Just Become Public Domain

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I think a lot of people view silent-era cartoons as a footnote in animation history. I've certainly made that mistake in the past. But a brief glance over the treasure trove of animation produced in 1926 reveals a level of creativity that is truly staggering.

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Smartcopying Information - Copyright on Films

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Smartcopying Information - Copyright on Films

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For teching purposes, viewing and limited distribution of content in films (eg. trailer from YouTube) are allowed under a special exception in the Australian Copyright Act (Section 28) provided it is:

in the course of education and is not for profit; and

the people in the audience or class are giving or receiving instruction related to it's contents.

N.B - "Teachers can upload films to a school intranet or DTE in order to play them in class, but they should remove them from the DTE, or remove access to the films by students, as soon as the class is over."

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Updated 20 July 2021

Teachers regularly use films and videos for educational and other purposes. The films or video content could be from a range of sources such as Netflix, YouTube, Stan, Google Play, Amazon Prime, iTunes or Apple TV.

What is a film?

In this section, the term film refers to all audio-visual material such as films, videos and DVDs that show moving images with or without sound.

Examples of films include:

videos

feature, short and documentary films

animations or cartoons

on demand television programs offered by subscription services

film trailers

television advertisements

corporate or education videos

video and computer games

podcasts and vodcasts of audio visual material.

We are not talking here about television broadcasts, which include any audio-visual material that is:

broadcast on free-to-air television

free-to-air television content made available online by the broadcaster at the same time or after the broadcast of that content

scheduled broadcast content on subscription TV (eg Foxtel), excluding any on demand content offered by those subscription services (eg Foxtel On Demand and Kayo Sports).

If you are using television broadcasts, you may be able to rely on the Statutory Broadcast Licence. For more information see Radio and Television Broadcasts.

It is essential that films played in schools are obtained from legitimate sources. Films, for example, may be purchased or hired from non-theatrical film distributors, licensed lending libraries or educational sources for screening on school premises or downloaded from legitimate film sites (eg iTunes).

Playing pirated copies puts you, your school, your principal and your educational body at risk of serious civil penalties which include payment of compensation to the copyright owner as well as criminal penalties. For this reason, schools should not accept donations or loans of DVDs or videos from students or parents. We recommend that schools source their own films to ensure that they are not pirated copies.

Playing films
In class
Teachers and students at schools or TAFE can play films (eg stream from YouTube, Netflix or Stan or play from a DVD) in class under a special exception in the Australian Copyright Act (section 28) provided it is:

in the course of education and is not for profit; and

the people in the audience or class are giving or receiving instruction or are directly connected with the place where instruction is given.

Teachers can upload films to a school intranet or DTE in order to play them in class, but they should remove them from the DTE, or remove access to the films by students, as soon as the class is over.

For further information on s 28, schools should see Performance and Communication of Works and Audio Visual Material in Class: What am I allowed to do?' and TAFE institutes should see Performance and Communication of Works and Audio Visual Material in Class: What am I allowed to do?
For non-teaching purposes
S 28 will not apply to teachers and students playing films for non-teaching activities (eg at camps, on bus excursions or for lunchtime entertainment on rainy days).

The Australian school sector has negotiated a voluntary blanket licence, called the Co-Curricular Licence, with Roadshow Public Performance Licensing ('Roadshow') for the playing of films by schools for non-educational purposes. This includes:

at school for entertainment purposes (eg at lunchtime on a rainy day)

on bus excursions, where the school provides the DVD (not the bus company)

at school camps and excursions, including outdoor screenings at camp, where the school provides the DVD (not the camp)

at after-school care and holiday programs conducted at and by the school.

Not all schools in Australia are covered by the Co-Curricular Licence. Schools that are not covered by this Licence must seek permission from the non-theatrical distributor of the film to play the film for non-educational purposes. To find out whether your school is covered by the Co-Curricular Licence, contact your local copyright advisor. Note that this agreement does not apply to TAFE.

For further information on the Co-Curricular Licence, see information sheet Playing Films for Non-Educational Purposes. TAFE institutes will need to obtain a licence to play a film for non-teaching purposes.

It is generally fine for students in a boarding house to screen a film for their own private purposes as it won't be considered a public performance.

Making a copy of a film and uploading it to a school's DTE

If a teacher wants to make a copy of a film for a specific educational purpose (eg they want to upload a documentary on World War II to the school's DTE in order to show it to a year ten history class), they may be able to do this under the flexible dealing exception provided:

they, or the school, own a copy of the film, but the copy is not in a format that they require and they are not able to buy it in the required format

the film can only be viewed by the teachers and students in the relevant class (i.e. the film is accessible to students in one course as opposed to the students enrolled in the entire institute)

the teacher removes the film from the DTE or disables access by the students to the film immediately after the class.

Some examples of uses that are permitted under the flexible dealing exception include:

making a digital copy of a DVD to upload to a school's DTE in order to play to a geography class

compiling extracts of audio-visual material for use in class (eg making a compilation of short extracts of several films for an English class) when it is not possible to buy a similar teaching resource

downloading a YouTube video to play in class. For information on downloading YouTube videos see Youtube - Using.

Labelling copies

It is good practice to label copies made under the flexible dealing exception with words similar to:

'This material has been copied and communicated to you in accordance with the educational use provisions of the Copyright Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice [insert date material has been copied and made available to students].'

For further information see Flexible Dealing.

Other copyright exceptions

Teachers may also be able to rely on one of the copyright exceptions when a copying films or videos for specific purposes.
Fair dealing
Teachers and students may be able to copy and communicate films under the fair dealing for research and study exception. Teachers will only be able to rely on the fair dealing exception in limited circumstances, (ie it must be for their own research and study and not the research and study of their students), but students using films as part of their study will generally be able to rely on the fair dealing exception of research and study.

For more information see Copyright Exceptions.
Disability exceptions
If you are copying or communicating films in order to make them accessible to a student with a disability, you may be able to do this under the disability exceptions.

For more information see Disability Access Exceptions.
Exam copying
Teachers are allowed to copy and communicate films for use in online and hardcopy exams. This exception does not extend to practice papers. You can only rely on this exception to copy and communicate text for actual exams and assessments.

For more information see Copying for Exams.

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Updated 20 July 2021 Teachers regularly use films and videos for educational and other purposes. The films or video content could be from a range of sources such as Netflix, YouTube, Stan, Google Play, Amazon Prime, iTunes or Apple TV. What is a film? In this section, the term film refers to all audio-visual material [...]

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Soundtrap - Audio Workstation & Composition Tool

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Soundtrap - Audio Workstation & Composition Tool

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Soundtrap is a cloud-based digital audio workstation (DAW) that is reimagining how music and podcasts are created. Soundtrap utilises graphic notation methods, can act as an audio recording studio that enables students and teachers to collaborate in a safe real-time learning environment using any device, at any time, from any location.

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Teoria is an interactive website that provides an wide array of exercises aimed at enhancing ear training and sight singing practice. Teoria can be used in peer-peer collaboration in building aural skills at tailored pace to suit learners.

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Flat for Education is a powerful, yet easy-to-use, cloud-based music (traditional) notation platform that offers real-time collaboration, intergration to Google Education, streamlined collection of assignments or tasks, have meaningful deep discussions in live video or written chat, audio recording, worksheet creation, composition templates, real-time feedback and commenting, transparent privacy capabilitites and protected student data, plus more.

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Discover Flat for Education

Discover Flat for Education, a dedicated music learning environment for your school. This offer includes all our premium features plus dedicated education features: classes, assignments, seamless integrations with Google for Education, Microsfot Office 360, Canvas, and more.

Hundreds of thousands of students and teachers are already using it. Try it for free during 3 months.

Discover Flat for Education

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Flat.io Music Notation Software - Features

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Discover the most sophisticated and easy-to-use tools and features to elevate your compositions and unleash your creativity.

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How to Use Tomplay - Interactive Music Score & Annotation Tool

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How to Use Tomplay - Interactive Music Score & Annotation Tool

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This tool is beneficial for playing along, creating backing tracks of sheet-music, looping of sections, recording of yourself, other co-composing capabilities, and annotation capabilities.

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SRF helps improve sight-reading skills (the ability to read sheet music), but it will also help students work on their pitch accuracy and rhythmical skills. SRF is a tailored to the specific needs or the needs of your students. SRF has multiple levels of difficulty that progress and generate as appropriate to the skill of the musician. Exercises can also be customized by selecting the exact rhythms, range, intervals, accidentals, dynamics and articulations. SRF allows educators to assign tasks, and has a guided (think metronome, play/progress bar) and independent recording feature for assessing students too.

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Practice Sight Reading and Sight Singing Exercises Online – Sight Reading Factory®

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SightReadingFactory.com makes practicing the important skill of sight reading quick, easy, effective and fun! This cloud-based service allows you to customize and generate unlimited sight reading examples instantly, on-demand for students of all ages and abilities.

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Creative Commons Liscence Animation - Big Bunny 

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Creative Commons Liscence Animation - Big Bunny 

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This animation is included in one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created.

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Big Buck Bunny 60fps 4K - Official Blender Foundation Short Film