Inquiry Based Project

I've never had any experience with Inquiry based project. This week I completed my Inquiry based project. I had a lot of fun doing this project, it makes me really excited to start teaching and start using wikis in my classroom.

I believe that my students will love doing research on composers that they are performing in class. I think that it would be really cool for each student to choose their favorite composer and make their own wiki. That way every student gets a link to the history of various composers.

I feel more comfortable than before about using wikis. I really struggled with putting the picture in and getting it to upload properly, but for the Inquiry Based project I was easily able to complete the assignment. I had no problems completing this project, I simply followed directions and made my project unique for my future classroom. I really loved this assignment! 

New York Philharmonic Kidszone

The New York Philharmonic Kidszone is a great website resource that I will definitely give to my students to use. I believe that a lot of my students will love using this website because of how easy the site is laid out and how fun and informative it is. This website is great for students from 5th to 7th grade. This site would be most helpful for recruiting students from the 5th grade into the orchestra program for middle school. Students can listen to instruments on the website and learn a little about their role and history in the orchestra. This will help them to decide which instrument that they would be interested in. The only problem with the website is that some of the links on the website are dead and adobe flash player has to be installed to be able to use the website. Overall the New York Philharmonic Kidszone is a great site that also teaches students to think creatively through interactive games where they can compose music and even create their very own instrument. I love this website and I think that it is a great tool that anyone interested in a music program can use!

The website evaluation is going to be very useful for observing future websites. I enjoyed exploring different music websites and researching factors that make a website more reliable. I learned that when I'm looking for a good website that it should be "reliable, accurate, current, presented with no apparent bias and follow good design." This helped me achieve learning objectives that I would want to have in my classroom. I was able to accurately assess a website and decide for myself if I would want to use it for my own classroom.   

My use of Wikis

Wikis are a great resource for a classroom! I have used wikis in my African studies class last semester. We had a large group project and were required to create our own website, with videos, pictures, and papers. It was really easy to use a wiki in our group project because other group members were able to read students works to help edit and improve papers. I also really liked that all of the resources for our project was easily accessible in one place. We were trained how to use wiki by a media librarian. As far as experiences go, this is my only experience using a wiki in a classroom.

I'm excited about reviewing wikis because I want to make sure that I truly know how to use everything that is available through a wiki program. I like how we made our own account because our teacher started our wiki for us so I never knew how to even start my own wiki. I also enjoyed learning how to upload a proper picture to my wiki and upload a picture for my account. Having an account picture makes it easier to be able to distinguish different accounts. I think that wikis are a great tool for completing group projects!

Although using technology within a music setting is difficult I do believe that there are some ways that I can find ways to integrate them in the classroom. I think putting historical information about composers and different musical style periods will be very useful for my students. I also will list different technique videos such as how to shift, how to use vibrato, and how to articulate bowings on my wiki. Also adding links to other website sources, such as Musictheory.net will be helpful for my students when the need extra help outside the classroom. And finally assigning a group project where students will write about important composers and events in the classical music world.      

Goals for TPTE

Hello my name is Emily Wyant I am a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in Viola Performance and music education. From the first day of TPTE I could see that the class could be challenging yet rewarding. Technology has made a large impact on how it is used in education. Using different mediums of technology will help my classroom become a better place. My goal in this class is to be able to absorb as much information as I can to help me to be able to use different technology within a classroom setting. I want to be able to easily upload videos, pictures, and information that my orchestra students can do, so that they may have a resource for practicing at home. Videos and listening examples are crucial tools that I can use to help improve my music student's educational experience. I am excited to learn about how to use technology, and decide for myself what is going to be most useful in my orchestra class.