Music and Multimedia Summer Institute......Day 2

Day 2 is finished, and I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment with my project, and some other mini- projects that have popped up as a result of the networking that has been going on in my Independent Study classroom.

Here's what my workstation looked like today.....manuals, iPad, Macbook, PC, and LOTS of cords going everywhere! (Did I say that I'm thankful for the power strip near my table?)

I have made forward progress on my Finale project and although I'm not entirely familiar with EVERYTHING I certainly feel like I'm getting down the basics. I received some helpful hints from another colleague who has used the software...thank you, thank you! She was able to help me with some articulations and setting that were giving me problems.

I should probably mention that the piece I'm converting into a Finale file is a Brahm's piece, Waldesnacht, which is in Public Domain. Here's another bonus....score study!!! As a result of inputting all of the notes into the score I'm really getting to know the piece. The VT All-State Chorus audition piece has always been a madrigal which comes from a four year rotation list so this German lieder will be a much welcome change for me. Wunderbar!

In order to keeps things from getting a little bogged down I interspersed my Finale work with some work on my "Connie's notes" blog:

• added: "Blogs I Follow"
• tweaked the width of the the page so that I could embed some Noteflight scores (more about this later)
• adjusted settings for comments

Special thanks to our in-house blogging guru who took time away from her own independent study project to help me with my blog editing.

After lunch, we had an overview and sharing session on Inside Music, the online music composition curriculum for students. For the past two years my elementary students in Grades 5-6 have been a part of the Inside Music pilot study through Music-COMP (formerly VT MIDI). I was asked to share about my experiences as an educator using the curriculum and I also shared some student work.

The positives that resulted from my students using this curriculum:

• understanding of key music vocabulary that was introduced in the video lessons
• purposeful composing (as opposed to filling up the score with lots of notes)
• evidence of depth of knowledge in their reflective journaling
• ability to access their work anywhere due to the content being stored in the cloud

In the late afternoon I checked out a session on Garage Band app for iPad that was informative and fun.  We had time to create some of our own pieces and explore the app. .....and as a result, I bought the app.....more about this later too!