Virtual Choir: Building A 21st Century Ensemble Zachary Gates Hammarskjold Middle School, East Brunswick, NJ Zegates93@gmail.com
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With this in mind, how do you use technology to completely transform a choral classroom? How do you make it meaningful and fun for students? These were questions I asked, and questions someone had already answered. In 2009, popular composer Eric Whitacre embarked on a mission to create and produce a “Virtual Choir” in which multiple videos of singers were virtually displayed and together performed Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque.” This process invited singers with a webcam, headphones, and internet access, to record and upload videos of them singing with Whitacre conducting them. After this process, a team of people stitched together the 243 videos from 12 different countries to create quite a captivating video. In September, 2016, with the help of a team of administrators, teachers, and with the generosity of the East Brunswick Education Foundation, we set out to make our own “Virtual Choir” for East Brunswick Public Schools. There were quite a few things that inspired us to take on this challenge. First, our district has a 6-7 middle school, 8-9 junior high, and a 10-12 senior high school. While our choral curriculum is vertically aligned and articulated, enrollment is not. We found ourselves lacking a consistent, engaging, and shareable platform where students were able to sing with peers from around the district regardless of grade-level, enrollment history, or ability level. In short, we wanted to simultaneously build recruitment and community, while redefining the way tech is integrated into the classroom. To help achieve our goal of making a “Virtual Choir”, we were awarded a grant from the East Brunswick Education Foundation for four “iPad Pros” and four “Shure condenser microphones that would allow us to have multiple devices across our schools. These devices would either be able to play the conducting video that we made and students would sing along, or students would record their actual singing. In retrospect, we should have also asked for professional video-editing software and a website domain that would be free of the
n a recent conversation with a fellow colleague, he asked me why it seems like choral education is always the slowest moving field in terms of integrating new technology into the classroom. I’ve heard the common choral critiques before: not enough literacy, always chewing gum, and “choral-ography” that all but drowns out the sound of the choir. In all honesty, this critique was a new one for me. Is choral education behind the times relative to the rest of music education? I tried to think of my peers who would argue against that—the ones who video record assessments, teach units on GarageBand, and help kids stay in tune with the InTune app. Those people might disagree that we are behind. There is, however, a large population that believes all their classroom needs are risers, a piano, and a chalkboard. For many teachers, regardless of belief, this is all that they are provided. It’s important to see that the quality of how we integrate technology in the classroom is more important than the quantity or frequency that integration is occurring. A good resource to self-assess the quality of tech integration is Ruben Puentedura’s “SAMR Model” (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition). While “substitution” and “augmentation” are common positive enhancements, if we want education to be transformative, we need to consider “modification” and “redefinition” as higher quality levels of tech integration that seek to transform learning itself.
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OCTOBER 2017
