philosophy statement

I believe that technology can be a great tool in teaching. It gives students more hands on opportunities and can also make it much easier on the teacher. Here are some examples for music education. First, elementary school students are hard to keep on task but what if they are playing a game? The internet has many fun games that teach basic core music elements. A good place to find these is a website musictechteacher.net but there are many other games on the internet. For the middle school, there is a free program called GNU- Solfege (solfege is do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do) that helps students play scales and learn note intervals. They can also use the program audacity, which is also free, to do playing tests and you as the teacher can listen to and grade them later. This technology saves time because the student can just go into a practice room and do their playing test while class is going on and the rest of the students do not lose rehearsal time. For the high school level there are many ways that technology helps students learn. Hopefully by this time they already have the basics of music down but if they are fuzzy the teacher can always bring up one of the elementary school games for a fun refresher course. One great thing a teacher can do is record his/her ensemble. This will give the students an idea of how the whole piece sounds and it will also show them spots where they need to work on things.  There is also a music program out called SmartMusic that allows students to practice their part in the comfort of their own home but still have the rest of the parts playing with them. This is a great way for the student to be more confident on their part. Technology has had a great influence on music education and with the amount of technology in today’s world, the students will enjoy it.