Amy M. Burns

Elementary 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.

Performance: Performing their first melody on sol and mi

These are two examples of my kindergarten classes performing their first melody on the Orff instruments. The melody comes from an old series of music curriculum, but any sol mi song would do. We were learning, “Spring is here. Spring is here. Birds and flowers now appear.” Once they mastered the melody by singing, using body signals (head for sol and shoulders for mi), using hand signals, and moving to the pitches, we then learned to perform it on the Orff instruments. Once they were successful, I took one student who has a very good steady beat, and had him/her perform the steady beat on the contrabass bars. Finally, I used GarageBand and a snowball USB microphone to record them. Any recording app on a mobile device, tablet, or laptop would have worked as well.

I am very proud of my kindies!

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