Several years ago I tried to purse some research on whether or not using music video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero could actually be used as educational tools in music classrooms. While there were a few concepts that could possibly benefit from the use of these and other rhythmic oriented games my final conclusion was that at that point in time they probably couldn’t be incorporated as a legitimate part of any educational curriculum. Fast forward to 2010 and the release of Rock Band 3 and things have changed quite a bit.
Please note that this review of Rock Band 3 is purely from an educational perspective. As a fun game to play with friends RB3 is top notch to say the least, and there are dozens of other reviews of the game for those wanting to explore the game play aspect of it. This review however is solely dedicated to whether the game could actually help a pianist, guitarist, drummer, or singer to play a real instrument better.
Read more: Rock Band 3 Review- From A Music Teacher's Perspective
Interactive Whiteboards In Music Education- Making The Case Pt 3 from Chad Criswell on Vimeo.
This is segment 3 of a continuing series of clips from a presentation on the use of interactive whiteboards in music education. Featured in this segment are even more reasons to consider using IWB's in a music education or general education classroom.
Of primary importance in this segment is the discussion that even more important than the board is the software that goes along with the board to create lessons and other interactive activities for classroom use. Featured are some of the flash based interactive activities provided by the SmartBoard company and their Smart Notebook software.
Read more: Interactive Whiteboards In Music Education Part 3- More Making The Case
Interactive Whiteboards In Music Education- Making The Case Pt 1 from Chad Criswell on Vimeo.
The first part of a segment of a presentation on making the case for the use of interactive whiteboards in the music education classroom. Includes a discussion of the main benefits of using IWB's, what you can do with an IWB in the classroom, and why it is much more than just a glorified overhead projector.
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Download the presentation packet here:
Interactive Whiteboards In Music Education- Introduction from Chad Criswell on Vimeo.
The introductory segment of a presentation (uploaded by the author) on the topic of Interactive Whiteboards in Music Education. This three minute segment is an introduction to the segments that follow and includes information on the topics to be discussed as well as information on how to obtain a printed copy of the session handout.
Download the presentation packet here:
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recent versions of Finale and Sibelius have really lent themselves to
allowing users to create attractive worksheets and handouts using high
quality music notation. There are still times however, that a teacher
or other user wants to move pieces of a composition into other
publishing programs such as Microsoft Word or Open Office. An example
of this would be wanting to paste the graphic of a four bar phrase into a
Word document or save that four bar phrase to be included in an online
web page. The good news is that you can easily save either segments of a
score or entire pages of a score as JPG, EPS, or other graphic formats
using tools that are already built into the music notation programs.
Read more: Exporting and Importing Music Graphics and Images Out of Finale
When Noteflight first appeared on the scene over a year ago (read the original Noteflight review) I was happy to welcome it with open arms. At the time of its debut cloud computing was finally starting to take root in the form of online services such as Google Docs and other similar ventures. Noteflight was the first truly usable online music notation program that I felt was a worthy replacement for bare bones, basic editing programs like Finale Notepad. At the time it was a little rough, but the product has matured quite a bit and now the company has rolled out a new premium version of the software dubbed Crescendo which offers even more more storage space, commercially sampled sound fonts, and other requested features such as score templates and guitar tablature.
Still, why should a music teacher care about it if they are more comfortable with Sibelius, Finale, or Notation? It turns out there is a significant reason, especially if the teacher is using the product in a large group classroom setting.
Last week I wrote a blog post about how I was now convinced that the SmartBoard was probably the best interactive whiteboard option for most music education classrooms. That opinion has not changed, but I recently came across a very good blog that devotes itself to the Wiimote Whiteboard system. For those of you that are not familiar with the idea you can make a fully functional yet cheap interactive whiteboard (IWB) for less than one hundred dollars by using a Wii video game remote, a bluetooth USB dongle, and an infrared pen.
Read more: Make An Interactive Whiteboard For Less Than $100
Read more: Thirty Days With A SmartBoard And Why I Won't Go Back
A week or so ago I found myself working in Finale 2010, writing out a new set of warmups for my beginning band students. In the middle of it all I realized that I was asking some of the instruments to play some notes that I knew not everyone would be comfortable with in terms of fingerings. I knew that in Sibelius there was aplug-in that let me automatically add brass fingerings just by highlighting and clicking the tool, but so far as I knew it was only limited to the three valve brass instruments. I went looking for a way to easily add instrument fingerings to Finale and came across a site calledMusicTeacherTools .com. Rafael Hernandez, the chair of the Department of Music at California State University East Bay has posted there several wonderful sets ofTrueType instrument fingering fonts that are perfect for adding fingerings on almost every common band instrument to not only music notation programs but also to any normal word processing document that you might need to use them in.
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