Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

To continue with this series, this blog is about lessons that can be performed in the computer lab that involve software. Again, I am not encouraging every elementary general music class to be conducted in the computer lab. I am encouraging a class here or there that utilizes, reinforces, and/or assesses the musical concepts that you have been teaching in your music class.

1. Sibelius Groovy Music: There are numerous ways that you can use Sibelius’s Groovy Music Series to reinforce or assess basic music skills. One way is to utilize the explore mode by reinforcing your lessons that involve sound, rhythm, and pitch. For example, if you are teaching your 1st graders about fast and slow music, you can use the Groovy Shapes lesson in the “explore section>rhythm>fast and slow” to reinforce the concept. In this lesson, the students listen, identify, and match music that is fast, slow, getting faster, and getting slower. At the end of the lesson, they create tempo changes in the create mode. Another way is to have the students solely utilize the create mode to create music in certain forms, to create music with certain tempos or dynamics, or to create music using the musical elements of rhythms, melody, chords, arpeggios, and bass lines.
2. Harmonic Vision’s Music Ace: The 48 lessons found in Music Ace Maestro can be used to to review such musical concepts as the musical alphabet, notes on the treble or bass clef staffs, rhythms, notes on the keyboard, pitches, tempo, beat, and key signatures. For example, if you are teaching sixteenth notes to your students through traditional methods of singing, performing on instruments, and movement, you can then take your students to the computer lab and reinforce the concept by having them perform lesson 37 of Music Ace Maestro. The game that they would perform at the end of the lesson will assess their understanding of the concept.
   
3. Apple’s GarageBand: Apple’s GarageBand can be used to arrange musical loops to create a song. Depending on how your computer lab is set up, students could write lyrics and record themselves singing to the songs that they created, or they could compose a melody line and record the line using their instruments (such as recorder, Orff, or their band instruments).
4. Finale NotePad: Finale NotePad is a freeware notation software offered by MakeMusic. If you have permission to install software, or you can ask your tech department to do this, then you can install this on any computer in your school. This freeware is very limiting in what it can do, however, for younger elementary, this is beneficial because it allows your elementary students to feel success when they compose. You can use this software as a composition tool to have the students compose a melody in a specific form, to have the students arrange a pre-composed song with different instruments, or to have your students notate a traditional melody.

On a side note, I recently held a workshop at a school where I was not permitted to download software demos from the manufacturer’s website and install them on their computers. However, I was allowed to install the software demos from a CD. Therefore, I downloaded the demos to my laptop, then put them on a thumb drive (CD would work too), and then installed them onto the computers. If your school has a similar policy, this might be a possible solution for you.

Questions for you: If you have had music class in a computer lab, what software have you utilized successfully with your students? In addition, what issues did you run into by holding music class in a computer lab and how did you resolve them?

Thank you for taking the time to comment. It means a lot to me and I learn a lot from you!