Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the PA TI:ME conference’s keynote speaker, Dr. Scott Watson. Scott’s keynote address was titled “Unlocking Creativity with Technology.” It was an excellent presentation that included many wonderful students examples while it also made you think. His goal was to have you leave his presentation with one idea, and I came away with numerous ideas.

Scott’s keynote was based on a course that he taught last summer and will be teaching again this summer. He drove home the point that creativity is the use of the imagination in the production of an artistic work. He presented wonderful student examples including a 6th grade girl creating her own greatest hits album and a 6th grade boy creating a song about pollution for his social studies class. In addition, he showed a student work that was composed for the clarinet. Being a clarinet player, this example was amazing, and I believe that it was created by a 9th grader. It was very musical!

Scott also went into detail about the 8 principles of unlocking creativity. These principles promote creativity in students at any age. They include:

1. Allowing students to express themselves.
2. Offering compelling examples from other students or teachers.
3. Employing guidelines to remove distractions and to help the students to experience success.
4. Removing stifling products.
5. Facilitating improvisation.
6. Coaching.
7. Offering opportunities for feedback and assessment. Scott even writes a separate paragraph to each of his students about their compositions along with a rubric he uses to grade their compositions.
8. Employing performance.

I have briefed these 8 principles, but you can check them out in detail at Scott’s excellent podcast titled “What Music Means To Me.”
Scott will also be teaching this course at Villanova this summer.

In addition, Scott will be teaching “GarageBand Does it All!” from July 6-10 at Central Connecticut State University this summer, the same week that I will be teaching “Integrating Technology into the Elementary Music Classroom.” One can take Scott’s class in the morning and my class in the afternoon. This would be a wonderful week of learning music technology/integration/production so that you enter your music classroom in the fall with new materials, resources, tools, creativity, and assessment ideas.

I hope that you will check out both of our courses this summer!