Confession of a Choral Teacher

This is my confession.
I stand guilty of sin – specifically the sin of heresy against the Lord of Educational Technology. I as a teacher am entrusted with and expected to use PowerPoint, as well as projector screens, Smart boards, email and whatever technologies are available, to make my lessons approachable and comprehensible to my plugged in pupils. I have broken this sacred trust on more than one occasion, however, for several reasons.
For one, I do not have prep time to create extensive PowerPoints for every class I teach. My time goes into planning rehearsals, and into photocopying forms, communicating with parents, planning concerts and field trips. The number one priority must be music, and that’s where I feel like I fall short of my expectations on the technology education spectrum.

This is also my podium.
My second defense against the charge of heresy is that I am a music teacher, and I typically teach in a choir class, which operates very differently from the typical high school learning environment. We sit in rows, stand, and move around, always using our own bodies to make music. It may be low-tech, but learning happens on a high order, and it’s learning about our own natural abilities to make music. There is a beauty in a rehearsal atmosphere that defies the grace of a Smart board and surpasses the need for document readers and mobile phones.

I am required by my students, the music, and myself to be immediately responsive to what I hear, and to teach musical concepts as they arise. I cannot in this context make use of “educational” technology.

Choir is about performing as a team, in harmony and unity. It is similar to a gym class in this way, and also in that we are using our physical selves to learn and embrace curriculum. Gym class also typically does not involve many technological presentations.

One must state that students don’t seem to mind the lack of note taking and deskwork in either of these learning environments.

Lord, have mercy on me. I have sinned.

New Tech

This course has scope to consider so many possible avenues for exploration into educational technology and related issues that it is almost dangerous to lump all these avenues together. It would almost be better if communications technology were specified, or if we focused on research and presentations in particular. With a course named Teacher and Tech, however, we are constrained by our freedoms. Any technology that could potentially have an application in the classroom becomes our course material. Any idea that loosely connects technology to the idea of learning becomes a text.

One could say that we have not lived up to the idea of drawing those links yet between teachers and the technological cornucopia that is 2011. So far we have explored different technologies available to teachers and generalist classrooms. Some examples include Powerpoint, (although we have not spoken at all about projectors and screens) blogging, Podcasts, virtual classrooms, film and internet resources. We have spoken less about how to obtain technology for your classroom, how to decide whether a certain technology fits the bill as educational and useful, and what might be the different technological requirements of a specialty class such as music, art or power mechanics.

In terms of dialogues on the idea of technology in the classroom, we have had several good ones. One of them centered around a video in which kids of this generation are seen to be spending ridiculous amounts of time online, text messaging and playing video games. The video did a good job of showing that these kids are actually normal, except in some behaviors. One topic which I think bears further discussion is that we as teachers need to either meet students where they are at, in terms of using their technology (despite fears of pandering to the student’s whims) or teach the ethics of technology, reasonable restraint of “screen time,” and the value and nuance of face-to-face meetings with real people. I would argue that we can teach both, but the real debate is how far to lean one way or the other.

First Impressions

This is my second course blogging experience, for Teacher and Technology. My first was for a class last term about classroom management. Anyways, it's nice to be back online, and here goes another term of blogging up a storm.

My first impressions of the course were largely guided by the media presented in the first class, namely a Norman McLaren film by the name of Opening Speech. This was an excellent way to open a class about technology, because it presents some of the difficulties of living in an age where teachers rely on technologies to be effective in presentation. In this particular context, it was effective and rather charming to be welcomed in a humorous way. The film consisted of a man attempting to make a speech, but being fought by his communications technology. First, his speech notes were crumpled and out of order, so he abandons them. Then his microphone seems to take on a life of its own, and we are treated to a Marx Brothers type of slapstick comedy as the microphone evades every attempt the speech-giver makes to speak into it. Ladders, nails and pure strength prove ineffective against the reticent device, and he is forced to abandon (read: kill) this communication aid as well. Next, he takes a bigger leap, and physically jumps into the projection screen, where we see the content he had attempted to get across in a speech on film. This is where the context becomes important; the film was originally made for the Montreal film festival, where the power of film would have been the message to that audience. To our class, however, without the context of “film festival” we see that technology gives us options about how to communicate information, and that we can explore different options. It also encourages us to be tenacious in our attempts to use technology.

I am enjoying the discourse on Information and Communications Technology theory in the course thus far. Hearing something that we all know in an intuitive way described so academically is somewhat like an out of body experience, but it is an interesting perspective to come at ICT from.