I haven’t blogged in a while. Today I feel like I have recently done some fun things in my rehearsals and made some discoveries that I would like to share.
First of all, I would love to become much more involved in all things GOOGLE. I attended the Ed-Tec
h Summit last year, where I won a Chromebook and was pretty excited about the potential of bringing some of the ideas into my classroom and rehearsals. There really aren’t a lot of helpful tips out there for GOOGLE and the Choral Director. I am working hard to change that and in the process, I have discovered the use of GOOGLE CLASSROOM and would like to share my findings.
My A Cappella Choir was given a writing assignment during our September pre-school retreat to interview everyone in the choir and write “fun facts” about them. I turned this into an assignment that they needed to submit in GOOGLE CLASSROOM. I appreciated the humorous writing style of many of them and really loved the fact that I felt as though I was having an independent conversation with my responses to each of them. We have covered the SI’s, Tenors and Basses and I think we are going to share our “fun facts” about the SII’s and Altos in skits in rehearsal. The group cohesion from this assignment has been priceless.
My Chorale class (9th and 10th grade girls) was given a solfege video assignment from the reproducible Masterworks Press STEPS TO HARMONY Series. The exercises are quite simple and run three lines at a time. http://www.masterworkspress.com/files/steps_to_harmony.pdf We use the booklet as a warm-up for sight-reading. As I gazed around the room recently, I noticed a few “mumblers”. Giving fair warning that my expectation was that everyone was working to their potential on singing the syllables, I finally gave them an assignment because, after all, students are so often only motivated by a grade. Because they all have cameras on their cell phones, I gave them one week to turn in the assignment and gave their groups of three the chance to sign up for a 20 minute block of time in class in the event they found it difficult to get together in their groups outside of class. I am finding the videos quite revealing and again, I am able to coach each of them individually as I grade their rubric through GOOGLE CLASSROOM.
My Concert Choir (Grades 9-12 guys, grades 11-12 girls) have been working on key signatures and scales. Thinking this was a review for most of them, I was surprised to learn that whatever most of them have learned has not been retained. So, again, GOOGLE CLASSROOM to the rescue! They have a www.musictheory.net Key Signature assignment where they will identify 30 key signatures in 10 minutes and then link their “report” in GOOGLE CLASSROOM to turn in. I like discovering more and more ways that I can assess my singers in as simple and paperless a way as possible.
My Music Theory class has just started non-harmonic (non-chord) tones. I placed a short example on the board to show them how we were about to transition from successions of static four-part chords to the more interesting melodic writing created by the addition of NHT’s. I found a YouTube clip which described the analysis of Chorale 167 step-by-step (albeit with 2 mistakes) as well as an interesting Bach blog which was a good way to explain why Bach and his Chorales are the foundation of basic Music Theory. I felt like a (geeky) rock star!
As I continue to discover more ways to use GOOGLE in my classroom, I will be happy to share.
Thanks for Reading!
Barbara