Notes take Flight

I have been intrigued by Noteflight, a web-based tool for composition for about a year, but it was not until recently that I have had the chance to use it with students.

For those who have used Sibelius or Finale, working in Noteflight is very intuitive.  But let's be honest - Sibelius 2 offered me pretty much everything I needed as a teacher (when I first used Sibelius 2, I was a high school choral teacher arranging for show choir).  Over the years, there have been great upgrades to composition software, but they are expensive, even for the student versions.  It was only a matter of time until something simpler, less expensive, student-focused, and more collaborative came along.

So here are my experiences with Noteflight in the first few weeks of use with my 8th grade general music class:

Noteflight Classroom options

• Yes, you could try to go the "free" route, but that gives each person a limited number of scores and the Terms of Use say it is not for children under the age of 13.
Trust me - the features offered with the educational version are outstanding.  Ordering through a purchase order was incredibly fast and easy.  There is nothing I can find about age restrictions in the Classroom version.

• Setting up a classroom was very easy - you just enter user names and passwords for every student in your virtual classroom.  You can set each student to a simple password and have Noteflight prompt them to change it, but I put in each student's district username and password.  I also choose to not allow my students access to the Noteflight forums.

• When you purchase a classroom license, you set up a closed community just for your students.  If your district uses Google Apps, the sharing options of Noteflight Classroom feel very Google-ish to both teachers and students.  You get a web address that looks something like this:
yourdistrict.sites.noteflight.com

Noteflight's teacher homescreen

Teachers can create and assign projects, and when students complete the assignment, it is automatically sent back to the teacher's account.  You can share scores with selected individuals or the entire class.  Students can choose to share with just selected people in the classroom or the entire class.  Editing, viewing, and commenting rights are very similar as well.

• One problem I see coming is when more teachers in my district start using Noteflight classroom, what will we do?  I hold the teacher account, but could have up to 250 students connected in one classroom at our license level.  If other teachers or classes wanted to start trying it, it could get quite messy.  Of course, Noteflight has options for multiple classes which cost more money.

• I am pretty sure Noteflight is supposed to work on mobile devices, but I have not been able to get it to work yet on iPads or iPhones.  I have not had any problem on laptops or desktops (both PC and Mac) and since Noteflight lives in the "cloud" students can work from home as well.

My next blog will be about what I have done with students so far using Noteflight.

Interviews and Questioning

I spent the day yesterday interviewing candidates for a music position.  Of course, I won't say anything about the position or candidates.

I just want to say is that interviewing candidates is one the best forms of professional development.
It always makes you think deeply.  It is one of my favorite things to do as a teacher.

We know great teachers ask great questions.
We know great teachers let the answers lead to even more great questions.
And that is what an interview is - questioning and answering in its purest form.

That is what happens on an interview committee - the members of the committee are challenged just as much as the candidates.  While the candidate sits in the "hot seat", the committee members silently ponder, "How would I answer this question?"  Interviews call us back to our roots as teachers by examining the reasons we teach, the content we love, how we work with students and parents, and so on.

Would we get hired for our own position if we were interviewed today?

If You Want a Child to Change the World ...

If you want a child to change the world, teach them to be a creator.

I am even more convinced of this after the conference I attended at the Milwaukee Art Museum last week which was about student creativity, engagement, and student-generated content.

Creation is always a community-oriented event.
The only reason we create anything is to provoke or elicit a response.
Created things are supposed to have an impact on our lives and on our world.
Just think of the times you have been impacted by a work of art, a piece of music, a great meal, an editorial, a movie, a new app, and on and on.

When teachers create something, we do it to change the future - one child at a time.
Is it possible that as teachers, our highest calling is to create creators?

If creation is truly the way to impact the world, then we have no other choice.  We must model creation in our classroom, create experiences, and celebrate creativity.

But on that path, it is our duty to instill the values of what good creativity is.  We must not allow it to be diluted to the point that creation does not have an impact upon others.  We must teach creation, but also appropriate appreciation of worthy creations.

Making the choice to be a creator means you are making a choice to impact people beyond your own walls.  If you are going to make an impact, you need to make the choice to be a creator.

Milwaukee Art Museum Connects

The Milwaukee Art Museum is our #1 "go to" place as a family.  But it is also becoming the "go to" place in the Milwaukee area for discussions about revolutionizing education and 21st century learning.  The so-called "Calatrava effect" seems to beckon not only great artists, but also great educators in recent years.  But, great ideas do not come to take shelter under the wings of the Calatrava.  Rather, they come to take flight.

On April 20, the art museum hosted a conference called MAM Connects: Creativity, Connectivity, and Student-Generated Content.  Chelsea Kelley, the museum's manager of digital learning brought together over 200 educators along with three keynote speakers: Logan Smalley (director of TED-Ed), Rushton Hurley (direction of Next Vista for Learning), and the director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Dan Keegan.  The conference was presented FREE with the support of Kohl's Cares.  I was one of the teacher leaders who led a small-group breakout session after the keynotes.  The twitter hashtag for the conference was #mamconnects.

Some of the great ideas and questions that came out of Saturday's conference included:

• How do we make problems portable?  Both Mr. Smalley & Mr. Hurley believe video is a prime way that students can make their problems portable, and since video elicits an emotional response, it also can make our solutions portable.  This is essential if we want students to succeed beyond the walls of our classrooms.

• Do we celebrate creativity in our classroom?  Truly celebrate?  Sometimes creativity results in an answer that we never expected, and that can be scary as a teacher.

• Do we create experiences, or are we merely curating knowledge?  Humans crave experiences.  We use knowledge to create new experiences.  Are we participants or spectators?  Dan Keegan, the director of the Milwaukee Art Museum is the most eloquent arts advocate I have ever heard, and he believes the mission of community museums have always been to create experiences.  Perhaps the transition we are going through in education is much the same.

• How do we balance process with product?  Especially if you are an elementary teacher, the process of creation in not only messy, but time-consuming.  We need to strike a balance that works for all involved.

• How do we hold high standards for creation as more and more students become "creators"?  It used to be that few students reached that top level of Bloom's taxonomy.  But as creation becomes more of a norm in education, how do we ensure that it does not become diluted?

• Who are the "educators" in your classroom?  Students have so much to offer - to each other and to us, the traditional "educators".

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this great conference possible!  I look forward to more great discussions about education at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Here is a link to the museum's teacher page.
And here is a link to the information about the conference, at least until the museum removes it from their calendar.

Winter Break

Took some time away from blogging recently, but I truly missed it.  As a music teacher, there is a long Winter season of concerts and events (usually December through March) that are great for us as teachers and for our students, but perhaps not as interesting to a reader.  But in the last few weeks, I have attended and presented at a few conferences and have been trying new things in my classroom that are blog-worthy.  Hopefully, Spring is coming as well as more blog posts.

Amazing Moments in a Classroom

Thinking and learning!

I pushed my kids beyond the point I thought was possible yesterday, and they responded with enthusiasm.  It was one of those amazing moments we savor as teachers.  And since it is music & edtech related, I thought I'd share it.  Here's what we were doing:

• While working on our Nutcracker unit, we were learning about the harp (Waltz of the Flowers).  But thanks to infuselearning.com, instead of just directly teaching them about the harp, I could send the students a link to a website about the harp and have them find the answers to my questions about the harp.  Then, students could submit answers through infuselearning which we could discuss as a class.  

But it gets better:

Screenshot of the various tabs 3rd grade students had open for work

• I also asked the students to have another browser tab open and logged into Google Apps.  When designing this unit, one of my essential questions was "What choices does a composer have when writing music that tells a story?"  A simple shared document was all we needed to gather all sorts of answers.  These students had never experienced a collaborative document - there was no need to explain it, and yet they got it.  Great discussion followed, more revision, and ideas shared.

This was a 30-minute class with 3rd grade students!  It was our fourth class on infuselearning so far and they had prior experience on Google Apps.  They had all sorts of browser tabs open, constructing their own knowledge and defending it in front of the class.  

All I had to do today was ask questions, such as:

How many strings does the harp have?

How many pedals does the harp have?  Why?

What are the colors of the strings on the harp?  Why?

Which finger do you not use to play the harp?

What choices do composers have when they write music that tells as story?

The students had to do the work and the thinking.
I just needed to provide the questions and the right tools for the learning.

Questions from Smart Notebook file for students

InfuseLearning - Student Response System

Every year, I teach a 3rd grade unit on the Nutcracker Ballet.  When I first started teaching elementary, the 3rd grade homeroom teachers would read the story, a dancer would come in and work with the students, and we would take a field trip to watch the Milwaukee Ballet's amazing version of the Nutcracker.  That left me (as a music teacher) plenty of time to focus on Peter Tchaikovsky and his music.  

Over the years, money grew tight (no more field trip) and time grew short (no more story or dancer).  That left me to teach as much as possible about the Nutcracker - Tchaikovsky, his music, ballet, and a video performance - in the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Needless to say, the way I have taught the Nutcracker has changed every year.  This year, I decided to use InfuseLearning while teaching.  I had used InfuseLearning with 8th grade students earlier this year, and thought I would give it a try with 3rd grade.  

InfuseLearning is a free, web-based tool which calls itself a "virtual learner response solution".  It is a student response system, but with some really great customizable features.  A teacher logs in and is given a virtual "Room ID" to provide to the students.  The students log in with the Room ID and name and then wait for the teacher to initiate "activity" in the room.  The activity can be questions, links, or drawings.  

Of course, 3rd grade students being who they are were surprised when their screens started changing when I would initiate activity.  The students would get excited anytime I would begin a new activity.  I had to tell them, "I know what your screen says - you don't have to tell me - I made it say that - go ahead and do it!"

InfuseLearning's teacher homescreen

You can ask many kinds of questions in InfuseLearning.  True/False, Multiple Choice, Sort/Order, Numeric, Likert Scale, and Open Ended Text Questions.  But I think the two features that make InfuseLearning stand out are InfuseDraw (which lets the students submit drawings to the teacher) and InfuseLink (which sends a link from the teacher to the student devices which open in a new browser tab).  You can also set up quiz questions ahead of time, and InfuseLearning offers options such as reading questions aloud, grading text answers by establishing key words, enabling a "don't know" option, setting up multiple classes, and more.

One drawback to InfuseLearning is that the entire class must be on the same activity at once.  If everyone finished a quiz except Johnny, then everyone must wait for Johnny before moving on to the next activity.  It is not exactly self-paced.  We also had better success on Google Chrome than Internet Explorer.  Absolutely no problems on iPads or iPhones using Chrome.  If I had students in a BYOD environment, I might use this tool every class, either for reflection, feedback, or formative quiz.  With 3rd grade students, we used a cart of 15 PC laptops, 3 iPads, and my iPhone and I gave students a partner.

The students loved seeing immediately how they performed, and they loved to see what everyone else's answers were, too.  Everyone was accountable for their learning, and sometimes the correct answer came from surprising students!  It created a collaborative community.  

Here are some examples of how I used InfuseLearning with the Nutcracker on just the first day:

• A quiz that I pre-created about Tchaikovsky

• Sending the students a link to the story of the Nutcracker to read

• Listening to selections from the Nutcracker and replying with instrumentation in the "Open Ended Text Answer" response box

• Sending students a link to ballet feet positions and having them Draw the various positions of the feet, labeling left/right in the InfuseDraw tool.

If you are looking for a great student response tool, give InfuseLearning a try (and of course, I am not receiving anything from anyone for this blog post).