AI Uses for Elementary Music Teachers

Recently, an elementary music educator asked the music education community if they inquired with the AI tool of choice on what music to plan for their winter concert program. I giggled at first about this idea, but I have found AI to have many benefits for me. Items I have used it for:

• Giving me examples for emails, letters of recommendation, and other documents. Previously, I would perform Google searches to accomplish this, but AI saves me a lot of time and gives me examples to work from.

• Lesson plan ideas.

• Curriculum integration ideas.

• Learning Objectives for each grade level.

• Progress reports, especially for challenging reports.

• Create lists for various activities.

• Help with wording for blog posts.

Those are just some examples. However, the concert list was one I had not thought of.

AI Tools

There have been numerous AI tools that have been offered over the past few months. In the rapidly evolving world of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to make significant strides. From automating repetitive tasks to predicting customer behavior, AI tools have become indispensable for businesses and individuals alike. Here are some notable AI tools that have gained popularity:
1. Chatbots: Have you seen Snapchat’s Chatbot? It is like asking Alexa, Siri, or Google for information with an avatar answering via text. Chatbots are AI-powered virtual assistants that mimic human conversation. They can handle customer queries in real time, providing instant responses and helping to automate customer support processes.
2. Virtual Assistants: Virtual Assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use AI to understand and respond to voice commands. These AI-powered assistants perform tasks, answer questions, and provide personalized information based on user preferences.
3. Automated Content Generation: AI tools like GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) can generate human-like text by understanding context and providing coherent responses. They find applications in content creation, automated news writing, and even chat conversations.

Ask AI to give you a more complete as the service I use to write this blog has an AI tool built in and came up with ten items. I chose three to use for this post.

AI Tools (two popular examples):

• ChatGPT: Powered by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an advanced conversational AI tool that uses deep learning models to generate human-like responses. It can be integrated into various applications, enabling natural and interactive conversations with users.

• Bard: Bard is Google's experimental, conversational, AI chat service. It is meant to function similarly to ChatGPT, with the biggest difference being that Google's service will pull its information from the web. Like most AI chatbots, Bard can code, answer math problems, and help with your writing needs.  

Please note that while ChatGPT and Bard are excellent examples of AI tools, there are several other powerful and innovative AI tools available in the market. These tools cater to different domains and functions, showcasing the diversity and capabilities of AI technology.

How to Ask AI To Give You A Concert List

Depending on your AI tool of choice, the more specific you can be, the better the results. For example, here is a link to the first time I asked ChatGPT to “Select the concert music for my elementary winter concert”.

If I ask “Please plan my elementary winter concert with six songs for ages 5-9” I get some repeats but also some more advice.

And if I ask Bard, I get the following response. At this moment, Bard will not produce a link to the chat, so I used the FireShot extension to take a picture of the entire webpage.

What Came Out of All of This?

Many of us were curious to know what the song “Snowflake-Samba” that ChatGPT listed in the first inquiry. I looked it up and found an instrumental song written in 2000 by Marcus Doneus. I did not find any other songs with the title in any of the usual places we find concert music like JW Pepper or Music K8. Therefore, I listened to it, liked it a lot, created a body percussion play-along video, and slowed down the tempo. This will be a great winter activity to have the students move to the steady beat, as well as talk about music styles and instrumentation (I loved the flute melody in this song!).