Recap of NJMEA Elementary Music Webinars From The 2016-2017 School Year
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t has been another wonderful year for our elementary music webinars. Back in 2014, I started asking elementary music educators to record webinars about relevant topics for our NJMEA members. My goal was for elementary music educators to be able to earn a professional development hour at a time that was most convenient to them. I am so pleased that we have had amazing educators such as Missy Strong and Musicplay author, Denise Gagne. This year, we have had five webinars. They focused on technology integration, assessment, and approaches in the elementary general music curriculum. I am hoping to have more webinars for the 20172018 school year.
Amy Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns@fhcds.org their classrooms by scanning a QR code or using a text code sent to their email/Google accounts. Parents can access their child’s journal through notifications that are received on their smart devices. Seesaw is an internal network so the items that are being posted can only be seen by the teacher and the parents of the students tagged in each post. For example, if my daughter Sarah is singing a duet with another kindergartner, and the music teacher wants to post it on her Seesaw journal and the teacher tags Sarah and the other kindergartner, then only I and the other kindergartner’s parent can listen to the song. Seesaw has three versions: free, Seesaw Plus for $120 a year, and Seesaw for Schools, which is priced per student.
To recap our 2016-2017 webinars, here are highlights from each of them. If you would like to view them, please email Amy at aburns@fhcds.org. If you complete a summary and answer a question about the webinar, you can earn 1 PD hour for each webinar. 1. Seesaw for Elementary Music Educators: Amy M. Burns, elementary general music educator and an ambassador for Seesaw (web.seesaw.me), demonstrates how to use Seesaw in the elementary music classroom. Seesaw is a student digital learning journal. She highlights how students can showcase their musical creations, assessments, concert selections, performances, recordings of their singing assessments, and so much more. Students can add their work via directly taking pictures with the app, recording directly into the app (audio and video), sharing links from websites, uploading files, and app smashing with numerous apps from GarageBand to Book Creator. Seesaw works across multiple devices from iOS to Chromebooks. Students can log into TEMPO
2. An Introduction of Conversational Solfege: Missy Strong, an elementary music educator for the Mount Laurel Township Schools, gives an introduction to John Feierabend’s Conversational Solfege (CS) approach in the music classroom. She explains how to introduce 36
MAY 2017
