At the Intersection of Technology and Pedagogy (Week 1 - Reading/Video response)

Technology and education both share many similarities.  Both change frequently, both can be tricky and intimidating to navigate, both seem overwhelming to many adults and underwhelming to many kids.

In a perfect situation, technology would fit in seamlessly and effortlessly with any given day's lesson, but sadly it never seems to work that way.  I remember hearing from almost day 1 of my undergrad program to keep extra back-up plans when working with technology, just in case the technology had a glitch or wouldn't work.  In a lot of ways, that advice seems sound -- downtime in a classroom can spell doom for the day's lesson and any sort of hopes for a well-managed classroom -- and speaks to previous experiences with similar issues.  But at the same time, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why we 'digital immigrants' struggle so frequently with technology.  Just as our students will react to our expectations, most often rising or falling to meet them, our own experiences have to be colored by what we expect to happen. Now, I'm not advocating that any teacher not have a back-up plan, but what if we approached it as if the technology was definitely going to work, and the back-up plan was for if our administrator walked in the door five minutes before class started to let us know we would be getting an extra prep period today because we won some arbitrary student-selected popularity contest?  Which now becomes more likely, that the technology will work or that we will need our backup plan?  While it may seem to verge on the ludicrous, taking a silly approach such as this helps develop a positive attitude toward technology because it takes away that reinforcing thought pattern that focuses on the breakdown of the tools.

Stepping away from personal paradigms, the idea of TPACK - Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge - as discussed in Chapter 1 of the Music Learning Today text by William Bauer really reinforced for me that technology shouldn't be used for everything.  The desire to meet school, district, and state goals for technology integration can lead to educators feeling highly pressured to include technology in every possible way.  As budgets tighten and standards increasingly refer to terms like 'digital', 'media arts', '21st century skills', and 'technology' itself, many educators that I have worked with or talked to feel pressure to try to do more in their classrooms.  Like so many other things, however, quantity does not equate quality.  As an orchestra teacher, integrating technology can be challenging!  I have 20 or more kids at a time, all with a pointy stick in one hand and a hollow wooden box worth several hundreds to several thousands of dollars in the other, and you want me to get them using computers and technology in the classroom?  I've developed some litmus tests to determine whether or not technology works as the best way for my kids to learn:

• Is it something that engages another mode of learning that hasn't been addressed in class for that topic?  
• Is it something that would be artificial in the ensemble classroom?
• Is it something that will benefit more than one student?
• Is it something that is reusable from year to year?
• Is it something that is more difficult / more challenging / impossible to accomplish without technology?
• Is it something the students can use without too much teacher direction?

If I can answer 'yes' to most of those questions, it would be a good use of technology in the classroom.  As an example, when my Promethean board was installed last week, one of the first things I did was create a flipbook where students could drag-and-drop circles that represented finger placement on a line that represented the string(s) on their instrument.  All four instruments were able to make it relevant by looking at steps as opposed to absolute fingers, and students had to use gross motor skills (moving their arm to manipulate the stylus) instead of fine motor skills (finger placement on the string of their instrument).  I was able to see where my kids understood the differences between half and whole steps on the fingerboard, and where we needed to do some more work.  Similarly, I have started using a free online program that allows students to test their music reading abilities and generates a score based on their accuracy.  It has limitations -- it has to be done in a computer lab or else one at a time on my classroom computer, so it takes time away from rehearsal if the whole group will participate.  It doesn't help students map what they see on the page to the fingerboard of their instrument -- they still have to link the knowledge of identifying the pitch to how to produce the pitch.  But it is much more effective to have 20+ students drilling note reading in the appropriate clef simultaneously, with immediate feedback and the ability to track progress over time compared to similar activities done on a projector or with flashcards.  It's infinitely differentiate-able by defining ranges, keys, accidentals, or even time- or accuracy-based goals based on a students strengths and weaknesses.

Technology isn't perfect, but taking a realistic and growth-minded approach to implementation of technology in the classroom goes a long way towards healthy implementation.