Midnight Music's "Free Festival of PD"
This week, Midnight Music is running its "Festival of Free PD" which includes four webinars for anyone to access until Cyber Monday.
Read MoreElementary Music Technology and Integration
Amy M. Burns has taught PreK-grade 4 general music for over 25 years at Far Hills Country Day School (FH) (https://www.fhcds.org/). She also teaches grade 5 instrument class, directs the FH Philharmonic, is the Performing Arts Department Manager, and teaches privately in the after-school conservatory after being the director for over 20 years. She has authored four books and numerous articles on how to integrate tech into the elementary music classroom. She has presented many sessions on the topic, including four keynote addresses in TX, IN, St. Maarten, and AU. She is the recipient of the 2005 Technology in Music Education (TI:ME) Teacher of the Year, the 2016 New Jersey Music Educators Association (NJMEA) Master Music Teacher, the 2016 Governor’s Leader in Arts Education, and the 2017 NJ Nonpublic School Teacher of the Year Awards. Her most recent publication, Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches (2020), published by Oxford University Press (OUP) is available from OUP and Amazon. Burns is also the Community Coordinator for Midnight Music (MMC) at https://midnightmusic.com/, the General Music Chair for NJMEA Board of Directors, and the Elementary Music Consultant for MusicFirst (https://www.musicfirst.com/), a company built by music educators for music educators, dedicated to helping music teachers and their students make the most of technology in the classroom.
This week, Midnight Music is running its "Festival of Free PD" which includes four webinars for anyone to access until Cyber Monday.
Read MoreLevel up from ChatGPT and try some of these AI tools specifically created for educators! This blog/episode focuses on three AI tools that educators can use to save them a lot of time and energy. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreTech Tip #3: Two Sites to Create Musical Dice and Stories
Check out this post to find ways to help your students improvise music and read and perform rhythm patterns!
Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreIf you are coming to summer break or a holiday break where warm weather might be involved, this play-along will bring your students to break in a fun and educational way. Plus, it celebrates Beach Boy Brian Wilson's birthday on June 20. This is an intuitive play-along for elementary students to perform successfully. The blog post also contains interesting facts and resources to learn more about the artist. #students #artist #elementaryteacher #elmused #elementarymusic
Read MoreThis new play-along is challenging! The tempo is quick, there are a lot of chromatic notes, the rhythm has a lot of playing on the offbeats, and the play-along encourages one to look ahead when performing it. I would highly suggest slowing down the tempo on YouTube by clicking on the settings choosing the “Playback speed” and slowing it down to 0.75 or 0.50.” Or use the “Transpose ▲▼ pitch ▹ speed ▹ loop for videos” Chrome extension that will allow you to change the pitch and key of most YouTube videos. In addition, I would use the screenshots/file found here in the blog post so that your students can practice this before trying it with the video.
Read MoreCanva’s “Brand New Era” was launched this past week. If you noticed, Canva had ten gift-wrapped boxes that when you unwrapped them, showed you some new tools and fun tutorials for you to use to explore those tools. As I worked my way through the tutorials, I realized that many of these will be useful in our music classrooms. Here are some ways to use these new items. Check out the blog and webinar video to see some examples and ideas on how to use these new features in the music classroom.
To check out more, read Canva’s blog here or check out a deep dive here when they launched it this week.
Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech/
Read MoreMarch Music Madness with a creative focus using Chrome Music Lab Song Maker. Read through the post or watch the YouTube video to see how to use or adapt this for an elementary music class across grade levels. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreThese are two tips that let you change a video so that it is mirrored. This is helpful for any movement videos or choreography videos where you need to mirror the teacher on the screen and they are using the terms left and right. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech Tools Used: https://www.mirrorthevideo.com/ https://clipchamp.com/en/
Read More#2 The trick of adding - between the t and the u in the URL
This is a quick video for #2. And “oldie but goodie” tip.
This is a trick that sometimes works, but not all of the time. To make the YouTube video become full screen with no ads, no comments, and no videos that will play right after, take the YouTube video’s URL that you would like to show, add a - between the t and u, and refresh the screen.
There are a lot of other ways to do this. Another way is to load the YouTube video you would like to show, click on the share button, and click on embed. A large iframe code appears. Click copy and paste the iframe into a new tab. Look for where the https begins and the URL ends, usually with letters. Delete the other items so you have a URL in the tab. Click refresh and the video is now embedded onto the screen with no ads, comments, etc.
Read MoreNeed a one-stop shop to create presentations, play-along video slides, manipulatives, programs, posters, and so much more? Want to see how to begin creating a play-along video using a free and amazing tool? Canva for education is it! Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreHave you ever needed free notation graphics that you could easily grab and use at a moment’s notice? Or have access to them to create manipulatives, presentations, worksheets, posters, and more? Look no further than Katie Wardrobe’s Midnight Music’s Big Free Music Notation Library COMPLETE 2022! Check out the webisode and blog about this great resource. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreMany of my favorite music educators from Katie Wardrobe to Jim Frankel have spoken highly of the free website, Vocal Remover (https://vocalremover.org/) created by Melnik Dmitry. This site can do so many things that you need for your music classroom, and it can do it for free on various devices because it is web-based. You are not required to login to use this, but if you become a patron, you will be able to use the website often. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech.
Read more to find out how to remove vocals, split accompaniment tracks into separate, instrumental tracks, and so much more!
Read More#8 Creatability from Google Experiments. Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
From the website: “Creatability is a set of experiments made in collaboration with creators and allies in the accessibility community. They explore how creative tools – drawing, music, and more – can be made more accessible using web and AI technology. They’re just a start. We’re sharing open-source code and tutorials for others to make their own projects.”
Use these three I show in the webisode to visualize pitch and dynamics and to give the opportunity for all of your students to make and create music.
Read MoreFor the past few years, I have counted down to the new year with a top ten list. I begin on 12/23 and end on 1/1. The list is comprised of 10 tech tools or tips for elementary and middle school general music. This top ten list will have a tech tool or tip featured each day in a short video and blog post. When we reach number one, I will follow it with a video of all ten tools and tips. Therefore, you can follow me daily, or come back on New Year’s Day and catch all ten at once.
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Like my resources? Please buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreCountdown to 2023-10 Tech Tools or Tips for Elementary and Middle School General Music: #10 Two Important YouTube Tips
For the past few years, I have counted down to the new year with a top ten list. I begin on 12/23 and end on 1/1. The list is comprised of 10 tech tools or tips for elementary and middle school general music. This top ten list will have a tech tool or tip featured each day in a short video and blog post. When we reach number one, I will follow it with a video of all ten tools and tips. Therefore, you can follow me daily, or come back on New Year’s Day and catch all ten at once.
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Read MoreOne of my favorite holiday pieces is “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” by Savatage / Trans-Siberian Orchestra (1995). It is a combination of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” played in the beginning of the song by a solo cello, and then in a round with a flute and guitar. The next part picks up the tempo and is the melody of “Carol of the Bells” or “Shchedryk”, the Ukrainian New Year’s song by Mykola Leontovych, written in 1916. I recently arranged this piece for my school’s Philharmonic, which consists of students in grades 4-8 who play strings, brass, woodwinds, and piano. They had a wonderful time learning to play and perform the song, and it inspired me to create this play-along video. For this video, I edited the song and slowed down the tempo so that it could be successfully performed by elementary and middle school students.
Like my resources? Please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech.
Read MoreTaking five familiar live instrumental selections played often around Halloween time, this is a medley rhythm play-along intended for older elementary and middle school music classes. This is one of many play-along videos for the fall. Click like and subscribe, check out other play-along videos, and if you like my resources, please consider donating me a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech
Read MoreIt was another inspiring day at the New Jersey Association for Independent Schools (NJAIS) Innovation and Collaboration Conference! There were thought-provoking sessions and a wonderful keynote address. Here are my takeaways from Day 2, how some can be implemented personally and how some can be implemented in elementary music.
Read MoreCredit: https://www.njais.org/
The New Jersey Association for Independent Schools (NJAIS) held their annual Innovation and Collaboration Conference live, after having virtual conferences for the past couple of years. It was so wonderful to be back together in-person and to learn how educators are using technology in ways that focus on innovation and collaboration.
When I first attended this conference back in 2017, I left inspired. Jaime Casap, who at the time was a Google Education Evangelist, was one of the keynote speakers and he spoke about the fact that our current generation does not understand the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This was a popular question asked to many of us when we were growing up in the 20th century. Instead, they are asking, “What do I need to learn to solve that problem?” And this leads to collaborating with others to solve problems. His keynote inspired me to use technology in ways of collaborating to make music. This was very successful with students working together using Seesaw and Soundtrap to create music and reflect on it together. This was especially true when the pandemic hit and we had to adopt virtual learning.
The first day of NJAIS’s Innovation and Collaboration Conference proved to be just as inspiring. As I break down some of the sessions I attended, I end each reflection with what the tech tool or concept looks like in an elementary music classroom.
Read MoreLooking for summer PD where you can learn on your time, at your own pace, and about music creativity? Join us for a course that includes lessons and ideas for Garageband, Soundtrap, and Bandlab.
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