Thursday, February 19, 2015

Foundations of Music Amped Up with Tech

Singers in a choir have a lot that they have to balance.  They need to have good tone, great posture, nerves of steel and project their voices in tune.  It’s never too early to start practicing those basic elements and Mrs. Lyons is getting the Solon Elementary students off to a great start.


In Mrs. Lyons’ class, she is able to take advantage of Pearson’s online interactive music curriculum.  The great part of this curriculum, besides the amazing fact that the curriculum is tied and aligned to core standards and resources, it has a library of songs that can be modified to fit an individual class’ needs.  She can change the key and tempo of the song, plus she can isolate sections of the song, so that students can practice specific sections of the song.  As the song plays, the sheet music is displayed through the projector, and each note and word are highlighted as they come up in the song to help students follow along. Pre-recorded voices can be turned on and off to assist students when they are first learning a song.  

Check out how it looks in action, with a toe-tapping, twist song:






The addition of the online curriculum has helped students to be free of trying to balance songbooks and allows them to hands-free and heads up to start to model that good singer’s posture.  The isolation of music allows Mrs. Lyons to be able to offer lots of solo practice and gives her the opportunity to truly listen to their performances.  Singing a solo with a microphone can be pretty intimidating, but over ½ of the class that I visited tried out solos, with lots of peer encouragement, “you got this!” and round of applause to support every singer’s effort.  

The elementary students are practicing for upcoming concerts which begin at the end of March - Check the school calendar so you don’t miss out!

- Contribution from Amber Bridge, Grant Wood AEA Technology Consultant. Want to share what is going on in your class or collaborate on a technology project?  Feel to to contact me

1 comment:

  1. Our music program is amazing! Thank you for this great profile of how Mrs Lyons seamlessly integrated technology into her teaching!

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