So Many Pictures!

This past week I had the wonderful opportunity to take part in an interactive presentation by Darren Kuropatwa and Andy McKiel. This presentation enabled my peers and I to use images in a powerful and meaningful way (without using copyright material)!

With an overwhelming abundance of information and images floating on the internet it is easy to stumble across copyright material. I believe it is important for educators to teach our students how to properly site information and legally use images.

Darren and Andy suggested using compfight.com. This website provides its users with an option called creative commons. By choosing creative commons the website will filter the image search and only provide images that are legal to use.

After exploring compfight.com each student was asked to find an image that represented what they believe most matters in education. After finding an image we used pixlr.com to add text and site the image source. Each person in the classroom shared their image in a slide show and had a chance to briefly talk about it.

This activity was not only inspirational but effective. It provided each student with the opportunity to be creative and expressive. I believe it is important for students to freely express themselves in the classroom. This would be a great way to get feedback and compile ideas. It would provide students with the chance to have a voice and opinion.

In a music classroom I might have students find an image that represents how a specific song makes them feel or what it makes them think about. I would then have them write a few words on the image expressing more precisely their thoughts and have an open sharing time with the class. This would address the part of the curriculum called "Valuing Musical Expression".

Overall I love the power of images and believe that we must respect copyright laws in the process of using shared images! I'm excited to see how these two very useful websites can be used in my classroom!

Below is the image I created in the mentioned workshop:

The Power of Youtube

The impacts of Youtube have been huge in the past few years. This video-sharing website is filled with online tutorials, music videos, inspirational speeches, sermons, news broadcasts, pranks, funny homemade videos (typically of kids or animals)... and much, much more. Anything you want to watch is likely found on Youtube. It has become an extremely popular website making it hard to imagine the days that it did not exist.

Although this website can very quickly become the perfect way to waste time on a Sunday afternoon, it can also be used as a wonderful educational tool in the classroom. As a result of the wide number of videos found on youtube, the chances of finding something applicable to a unit or class discussion are quite high. Videos can be used in a variety of settings and for a number of different reasons. They can provide a building block for a class discussion, reinforce something already taught, increase engagement, relieve student stress, act as a visual aid, or be the basis of many projects.

As a future music educator I envision myself using Youtube in many ways, but most specifically for listening activities. Teaching my students to become active, engaged and analytical listeners is very important to me. Youtube contains a wide range of musical abilities. One way in which I could use this to my advantage is by asking students to listen to 3 different recordings/videos of the same piece. One by a professional ensemble, one by a good band and another by a beginner band. Students will then be asked to reflect on what they heard: Which video was most enjoyable to listen to? Why? What made one ensemble more advanced than the other ensembles? How do you hear our ensemble in comparison to the videos you just watched?

Youtube videos are endless and so are the ways in which they can be used in a classroom! Get creative and bring some youtube joy into your class!