BP15_2009103_Web 2.0 Media Asset

BP14_2009103_Web 2.0 Comment

(Original Post by Alicia Kalb)

Web 2.0 Tools - Lala

When I was researching music Web 2.0 tools, I wanted to find a tool that would allow me to take the music that I have on my computer and have a copy online. A big part of music education for me is having my students listen to music. Often I would use my iPod during class to have my students listen, but in the event that I cannot hook up my iPod to a speaker system, I need a way to listen to with my students. The Web 2.0 tool that I found that meets this need is called Lala (http://www.lala.com). Not only does it allow users to listen to complete tracks and albums before purchase, but it allows you to upload you entire music collection and play it from anywhere in the world. There is also the social aspect of the site, which allows you to listen to friends’ playlists and discover new music.

Besides having students listen to and analyze music, I would also use this tool for daily journal assignments. In my music tech class, I asked the students to complete a daily journal. I would play a piece of music and they had to answer the question on the board. Towards the end of the semester I would have the students create a journal entry for the class. Unfortunately it was more trouble than it was worth, because it was such a hassle having each student bring in a song. Some students brought in their iPods, which technically broke school rules, many told me which song they wanted to play, which meant that I had to find it, and some used online radio tools to play their music, but it only played a portion of the song. If I would have known about Lala last year, life would have been much easier. Each student could create their own account and upload their music to the platform. Then all they would have to do would be to log in to play their assignment. We could also use this program to save their own compositions that they created in class.

(My Comment)

Eric Anderson said...

This looks like a really interesting tool. I've also had the same dilemma as you -- I want to encourage students to share their music tastes and preferences with each other so that everyone can be exposed to a wide variety of music, but iPods are also banned in my school, and asking students to bring music burned to a CD just doesn't work. Have you had a chance to try out this site yet? I'd be curious to hear how it works with students.

October 18, 2009 7:41 PM

BP13_2009103_Web 2.0 Screentoaster

When we first learned about ScreenFlow several months ago, it instantly became my new favorite software application. It was easy to use, I immediately had dozens of ideas for how to use it in my teaching to create resources for my students, and after about an hour of playing around and watching the demo videos, I had created my first screencast. As the semester progressed, and my students were learning from the videos I was making, I kept thinking that it would be an even better educational experience for them if they could make their own videos. Unfortunately, our school doesn’t own ScreenFlow, and I don’t have the money in my budget to spend $1500 to buy enough copies for every computer in the lab. I thought about buying one copy and having students rotate through the one computer that would have it, but that just wouldn’t be practical.

Then I learned about ScreenToaster (www.screentoaster.com), a Web 2.0 tool that students can use to create similar types of screencasts to the ones that I was creating with ScreenFlow. ScreenToaster can record video from the screen, audio from the built-in microphone, and allegedly video from the iSight camera, though I haven’t yet been able to get that feature to work. Videos can be exported as .swf or .mov files, which can then be posted online or edited further with iMovie.

I’m excited to try implementing ScreenToaster with my Advanced Studio Tech class next semester. I’ve always wanted to find a way to have the AST students create an instructional module on Logic Express for the Exploring Studio Tech students to use, but I never felt that I had access to the right tools to actually make that happen. I didn’t think that taking still screenshots and posting them to a webpage or creating a printable PDF would be viable formats for this project. Now that I know about ScreenToaster, I’m planning to implement this next semester with my students and possibly integrate it into my action research.

The video below is a sample video I created with ScreenToaster.

References:

ScreenToaster - online screen recorder. Capture screencasts instantly. (2009). Retrieved October 18, 2009 from http://www.screentoaster.com/

BP12_2009103_Web 2.0 Noteflight

Music notation software was a huge technological breakthrough for musicians back in the pre-internet days, allowing musicians at all ability levels to experiment with music composition by connecting the visual elements of notation with the aural elements of music. However, there were two huge barriers to entry with this technology: 1. the cost to purchase the software, and 2. a very steep learning curve to be able to use the software at even a basic level. Over time, music notation software became easier to use, and a free version of Finale (the MS Office of notation software) became available. With the free Finale Notepad, students could access the software at home, and schools could have a copy on every computer in every lab. When makers of Finale started charging for Notepad, music educators were left without a valuable tool they had relied on for teaching music composition to students.

Fortunately, there is now a Web 2.0 tool available to fill the need for a free, easy to use music notation tool for students -- Noteflight (www.noteflight.com). Like traditional notation software, Noteflight allows users to compose and notate basic pieces for a variety of instruments and ensembles. Noteflight is extremely easy to learn, and the website has great tutorial videos and help files.

In many ways, Noteflight is even better than traditional installed notation software because it combines the features of notation software with the benefits of Web 2.0. Students can share their compositions with others on the Noteflight website. Compositions can be edited by multiple users. Noteflight compositions can be linked to or embedded in websites.

Beyond the traditional uses of notation software (all of which still can be accomplished in Noteflight) students can easily link to their compositions from a personal website, class website, or digital portfolio. Groups of students could collaborate on a shared composition. Students could easily get peer feedback on their compositions entirely online and away from school.

References:

Noteflight - online music notation. (2009). Retrieved October 18, 2009 from http://www.noteflight.com/

BP11_2009103_Web 2.0 Wordle

Wordle (wordle.net) is a fun and unique Web 2.0 site that has recently become very popular in my school district. Wordle is different from most of the other Web 2.0 tools that we’ve been looking at over the past few months, as it isn’t really a network or a forum or a platform designed primarily for publishing content.

According to the homepage, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” (Feinberg, 2009, para. 1). The concept is incredibly simple. Users type or copy text into a box on the site, and Wordle analyzes the text and creates a graphic word cloud from the text. Words that are used more frequently in the text appear larger in the word cloud. Once the word cloud is generated, the user can change different parameters of the appearance, including the color scheme, the font, the way the words are laid out on the page, and other settings based on the language of the source text.

There is a minor issue that affects printing in Mac OSX, which is easily remedied by installing a Java applet from the FAQ page of the Wordle site.

Wordle provides several interesting educational uses. It provides an interesting way to analyze text, especially the relative frequency of use of words in a given source text. An example on the Wordle site shows a comparative analysis of inaugural addresses by every president. My Studio Tech students are currently working on a project called the “Poetry Remix Project” in which they record themselves reciting a poem, then edit and remix the lyrics into a new poem. They’re using Wordle to provide inspiration for how to remix their poem lyrics, and they’re also using the word cloud images created from their poems as background images for their project page in their digital portfolios.

The Wordle image below was created from the poem “Charlie Parker played be bop” which I use as an example in my introduction of the poetry remix project.

References:

Feinberg, J. (2009). Wordle - beautiful word clouds. Retrieved October 18, 2009 from http://www.wordle.net/

Raschka, C. (1997). Charlie Parker played be bop. New York: Orchard Books.

BP10_2009103_Flickr lesson

Every semester I have my Studio Tech students create Digital Portfolios, for which they need photos and other media. Many students want to get pictures of the music lab or the recording studio at school, or other relatively generic school photos. If each student had a Flickr account, they could post their portfolio photos to their accounts and we could create a group for all the students in the class to share their photos with each other.

I always love it when students are inspired by other students sharing their work; this often happens when we share our digital portfolios. A class collection of photos on Flickr could provide this same inspiration to students.

Advantages to sharing photos this way would be that students could easily upload photos from home or school, using tags on the photos would make it easier for students to find the specific photo content they're looking for, and it would give students the opportunity to utilize a Web 2.0 tool for classroom use that they most likely already use at home. This would help to bridge the technological gap between the students' use of technology in their home life and their use of technology in their school life. Additionally, photos would be available from previous semesters' students as well, creating an archive of available photos for students to utilize in their digital portfolios.

Since we already use Flickr as a resource for finding Creative Commons photos, this would also provide a great opportunity for students to license their own photos. It would help to introduce them to the concept from the perspective of the content creator, not just the content consumer -- the role in which they most often find themselves. It would allow us to discuss and debate the differences between the different types of Creative Commons licenses and give students the responsibility of determining which type of CC license they feel would be most appropriate to their work.

BP9_2009102_Web 2.0 Media Asset

iGoogle ETC page

This is my iGoogle ETC page.

iGoogle AR page

This is my iGoogle AR page.

iGoogle WGO page

This is my iGoogle WGO page.

BP8_2009102_Web 2.0 Comment

(Original Post)

Recently, I discovered that Finale Notepad, a “watered down” version of the Finale family of music notation software is no longer available for free. At a cost of $9.95, it is certainly still reasonably priced, but not really practical for installation in a computer lab at school unless it is used more frequently than our music department currently uses music notation software. It was nice to be able to direct students to a free tool, too. They seem less likely to explore a tool that requires payment (especially credit card payment) on their own.

So, imagine my delight when in my search for Web 2.0 tools I found a free music notation tool! Noteflight (http://www.noteflight.com) is actually very similar to Finale Notepad, and I can definitely see myself using it for student composition projects. It allows users to create scores, share them with other Noteflight users (a feature NOT available from Finale) and publish them by placing html into a web page.

The entry of notes, rests, and rhythms into Noteflight is actually very similar to the Simple Entry feature of Finale. Personally, I prefer the speedy entry feature of the full-featured Finale, and since I own this software, I will continue to use. It. However, for a free product, Noteflight is very comprehensive. Students will be able to notate just about anything they want to, and can use the playback feature to hear what they’ve composed. The sharing feature could be really cool for class compositions, as well, though compositions can be kept private if that’s what a user prefers.

Files created in Noteflight are saved within the user’s “my scores” page. (Registration is required to use this tool.) They can also be printed (or saved as .pdf files.)

Overall, this seems like a great tool for student composition, and I look forward to giving it a try in my classroom. (Someday I may also look into the Noteflight Learning Edition which is a paid subscription service for educators to share scores, activities, and assignments with students.)

(My Comment)

Hey Therese, this looks like a great tool! I've been a Finale user for many years and I've always encouraged my students to get the free Finale Notepad. Since notepad stopped being free, I've been hoping that another free app would become available. The collaborative element also seems like a great feature. I'll have to check this out soon. Do you know if it provides an easy way to import or export files?

BP7_2009102_Web 2.0 Edublogs

Edublogs (edublogs.org) is a blogging site designed specifically for students and teachers to use in educational settings. Having never blogged before starting this program at Full Sail, I don’t really know a lot about writing blogs or using blogging sites or software. Edublogs is now the third blog I’ve set up (the first two being my action research blog using iWeb and my ETC blog using Blogger) and it is definitely the easiest of the three blogging methods I’ve used. (Or perhaps I’m just getting more comfortable with this concept of setting up a blog.)

So, with all the different blogging sites available, why would Edublogs be any different or better than any others? From my experience with the site, there are three distinct advantages that I was able to see after spending only a short amount of time on the site. First, the signup process was very simple. I didn’t have to have a Google account or a Yahoo account, and the first username I tried was available! Second, the information on the site is clearly directed at teachers or other educational users. There are a number of very helpful video tutorials on the site, and the examples contained in the videos and other documentation describe how teachers and students can use the site. Finally, once I had actually created my blog account, it was extremely easy to customize and edit. The site layout is very customizable and easy to read for both the author and readers. On the administrative side, it’s possible to automatically create accounts for students and add them as subscribers to your blog! This is a huge benefit for a school blog.

Unfortunately, the free accounts on Edublogs do have some advertising. There are two levels of paid accounts that one can sign up for that eliminate the ads and make it easier to create and manage student accounts.

I hope to be able to incorporate student blogs into my teaching in some way. I can envision my band students being able to comment on rehearsals or recordings and having insightful class discussions take place online. My Studio Tech students could get feedback from each other on projects or help their classmates with specific technical skills in Logic. I don’t know if Edublogs will be the blog solution I end up using, but it definitely seems promising so far!

References:

Edublogs - teacher and student blogs. (2009). Retrieved October 11, 2009 from http://edublogs.org/

VAHS Band. (2009). Retrieved October 11, 2009 from http://andersoe.edublogs.org/

BP6_2009102_Web 2.0 Zoho Docs

Zoho Docs is an online collaboration site similar to Google Docs. Users can synchronously or asynchronously collaborate on an wide variety of different types of documents or projects. The Zoho applications are divided into two different categories: office applications and business applications.

Zoho Office Applications

Writer

Notebook

Wiki

Sheet

Chat

Mail

Show

Planner

Zoho Business Applications

CRM

Creator

Meeting

People

DB & Reports

Projects

Invoice

For this blog post I’m going to focus on the office applications. Most of the Zoho office apps are virtually identical to the Google apps.

Writer is an online word processor that functions similarly to Microsoft Word. From my limited experiments in Zoho Writer, the most obvious advantage over Google is that the formatting seems to be easier. When I was working in Google docs last month with my EDE team, we struggled with formatting throughout the entire project. Indenting was inconsistent between editors and we were unable to give the document on overall consistent look in Google. We were however able to fix the formatting issues when we exported the document to Word, but it was time-consuming. One disadvantage is that Zoho Writer is not supported in Safari, only Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Zoho Sheet is a spreadsheet application similar to Microsoft Excel. Zoho Sheet has a variety of sample sheets and public templates that users can use to quickly create spreadsheets with charts, tables, and graphs. Available templates can also be tagged so that users can quickly find the type of templates they’re looking for.

Other apps available in Zoho Docs include Notebook, an online note-taking tool, Wiki, for creating Wiki sites, Chat and Mail, for interacting with other users while collaborating on documents, Show, for creating slideshow presentations, and Planner, for managing to-do items, notes, and appointments.

As with any online collaboration tool, Zoho Docs can be a valuable asset for students and teachers. Teachers can work together on curriculum for shared courses and have a centralized location for course material or content that can be accessed from anywhere. Students can collaborate on assignments when working in groups and be able to access their files from home or from school regardless of what type of computer and software they have access to.

References:

Zoho docs. (2009). Retrieved October 11, 2009 from http://docs.zoho.com/index.do/

BP5_2009102_Web 2.0 Wikispaces

A wiki is a Web 2.0 tool that allows multiple users to collaboratively contribute to and edit a website. Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com) is a site that allows anyone to create and manage a wiki site with very little setup and without requiring any knowledge of HTML code. Though there are a number of sites that allow users to create wikis, K-12 educators should be sure to check out Wikispaces to take advantage of their free upgrades to sites for educators. A limited number of free subscriptions for educators are available at www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers that allow teachers to have protected or private wikis that would normally be available only with the $50 subscription account.

Wikispaces allows users to create a wiki, set the parameters for who can access or edit it, and easily create new pages and add content to pages. Users can change the appearance of pages just as easily as in other Web 2.0 sites such as Blogger or Google Sites, and can add photos or upload files to the wiki. One important feature of a wiki site on Wikispaces is that others can subscribe to updates through RSS or ATOM.

A wiki site could have many uses in an educational setting. For example, as a high school band director, I could envision using a wiki to allow students to share information with each other such as contact info for private teachers, sharing information about upcoming concerts or other performances they might be participating in or attending, or compiling music-related sites or resources in a single location. My Studio Technology classes could use the wiki site to share their projects or get feedback from their peers. Students could then subscribe to the RSS feed for the pages on the site they’re interested in following so that they can automatically be notified when there are changes or additions to the page or the site

References:

VAHS-Music - home. (2009). Retrieved October 10, 2009 from http://vahs-music.wikispaces.com/

Welcome to Wikispaces - free Wikis for everyone. (2009). Retrieved October 10, 2009 from http://www.wikispaces.com/

BP4_2009102_Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has many uses in education. Based on the available research I came across in the EBSCO databases, school librarians seem to be leading the use of social bookmarking in education, especially in K-12 education. Delicious (www.delicious.com) is the most frequently mentioned social bookmarking site mentioned, though there are numerous other sites that provide similar tools and services. One advantage to using a site like Delicious for bookmarking is that bookmarks aren’t tied to a specific computer or a specific browser. For individual users, they have the benefit of being able to access their bookmarks from any computer with an internet connection. However, the greater benefits to Delicious are the ability to share and view other users’ bookmarks and the ability to tag bookmarked sites with searchable key words (Brisco, 2009, p. 61).

Once a user has a Delicious account and starts collecting and tagging bookmarks, the next step is to share those bookmarks with others. Teachers or librarians who want to share their specific lists of bookmarks with their students, colleagues, or any other target audience can use HTML code to embed Delicious data into a website. The advantage to this is that it allows the student or parent user to access the Delicious data while remaining on the school webpage (Darby & Gilmour, 2009, p. 100).

In addition to Delicious, other sites that provide tools for social bookmarking include Diigo (www.diigo.com), Magnolia (ma.gnolia.com), Backflip (www.backflip.com), and BlinkList (www.blinklist.com) (Shifflet & Toledo, 2008, n.p.). WebNotes (www.webnotes.net) is another example of a social bookmarking service that is being used by librarians to compile lists of resources and publish reports for target audiences of students, colleagues, and administrators (Harris, 2009, p. 14).

References

Brisco, S. (2009). A 2.0 TOOLKIT. School Library Journal, 55(8), 61-62. http://search.ebscohost.com

Darby, A., & Gilmour, R. (2009). Tutorial: Adding Delicious Data to Your Library Website. Information Technology & Libraries, 28(2), 100-103. http://search.ebscohost.com

Harris, C. (2009). What's Next for Social Bookmarking?. School Library Journal, 55(2), 14. http://search.ebscohost.com

Shifflet, R., & Toledo, C. (2008). Extreme Makeover: Updating Class Activities for the 21st Century. Learning & Leading with Technology, 35(8), 34-35. http://search.ebscohost.com

BP1_2009101_Educational Uses of Blogs

The use of blogs in education is becoming more common and more widely accepted as a valid educational activity for students and teachers. In my own school district, our district servers host class blogs that teachers can post to and students can comment on. (We don't yet allow students to create their own individual blogs on the district servers.)

Blogs provide an easy access point to publishing on the web, even for those who are not technology experts (Flierl & Fowler, 2007). Blogs offer more of a sense of ownership to the author compared to other methods of posting content online, such as forums or discussion boards. (Hong, 2008, p.34).

The nature of blogs allows for several different types of applications in education, primarily blogs by the teacher and blogs by the student. Teacher blogs could be used to provide course materials or supplemental information to students. Student blogs could be used to share information with the teacher, such as replying to an assigned writing prompt or reflection topic, or keeping track of progress on a long-term assignment. Student blogs could also be used to share information with other students, such as collaborating on a group project or getting peer feedback on assignments.

The following articles from EBSCOhost contained interesting information about the educational use of blogs, some of which is cited above.

Lierl, R., & Fowler, H. (2007). Educational Uses of Blogs and Wikis. Phi Delta Kappan, 89(3), C3. http://search.ebscohost.com

Hong, W. (2008). Exploring Educational Use of Blogs in U.S. Education. Online Submission, http://search.ebscohost.com

Ray, J. (2006). Welcome to the Blogoshere: The Educational Use of Blogs (aka Edublogs). Kappa Delta Pi Record, 42(4), 175-177. http://search.ebscohost.com

BP3_2009101_Anti-Teaching

Michael Wesch's article is certainly an interesting view on education, especially the type of education that I and many others received as undergrads in huge lecture halls for intro-to-whatever classes for the fulfillment of some requirement. It's interesting to think about how my experience in these courses might have been different or better of more meaningful if we had been able to use the technology that is currently available to educators and students.

The issue if significance is certainly an interesting one. As I read Wesch's article, I first thought about how much more I could have gotten out of the anthropology couse I took as a freshman in college if I had been able to use technology to work as a group and create a media-based project to demonstrate and share relevant knowledge rather than simply sit in a lecture, take notes, and regurgitate information in a little blue exam book.

So, given that I'm currently teaching high school students, how could course management systems or personal learning environments work to increase the significance or relevance for my students? Well, we know from Howard Gardner that all learners have different strengths and weaknesses in different areas of intelligence, so that seems to be an argument in favor of PLEs. And Eric Jensen's research on brain-based learning would tell us that a student who could jump around to different content in a CMS would be in a more natural learning environment than a student forced into a linear approach to learning.

Clearly Web 2.0 tools have an important place in education. Students in my school are currently using Google Docs to work collaboratively, discussion boards on the district website to share ideas and opinions, and social networking to coordinate all of their communications outside of school. By working to eliminate the literal and figurative firewall between students' uses of technology at home and at school, we're making progress towards becoming more relevant and significant to our digital native students.

I don't know if these uses of technology are the answer to the current problems our school system is facing, but they certainly seem to be a step in the right direction.

BP2_2009101_Google Reader

The five RSS feeds I'm following for ETC are:

1.) Educational Technology. This feed has a huge number of posts on a wide variety of topics related to educational technology. Skimming the posts and reading the ones that seem relevant will be a great way to be aware of current trends and keep up with new innovations.

2.) Electronic Musician. We subscribe to the print edition of this magazine at school, and it provides great information and resources for the Studio Technology courses that I teach. The website has even more great information on it, and now I'll automatically know whenever something new is posted to the site!

3.) ISTE Connects - Educational Technology Insights. We've been studying information from ISTE on our building technology committee, and this feed will be helpful for me to follow new information and publications from ISTE to bring back any relevant information to the committee.

4.) Music, Education, and Technology. This feed from a professor at the Berklee College of Music has information about the music technology courses and opportunities at Berklee, along with a number of videos with examples of how they use technology in their music school. The videos on this site would be great for the students in my Studio Technology courses to see, especially those who are interested in pursuing a career in music technology.

5.) MusTech.net. Another broad-topic music technology website, this feed even contains interesting articles like "What Can You Do With A Music Degree?" and other things that look like they could be very informative and useful to my students.