Best of the Elementary Music Technology Discovered During the Pandemic Amy M. Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns[at]fhcds.org
This past school year has been one with numerous challenges. From teaching remote to restructuring our entire curriculum, it has made many teachers feel like their first year of teaching all over again. One tool that most elementary music teachers had to adapt to was the addition or the further inclusion of technology in their classrooms. For many, it was the only way they would be able to connect to their students if they could not be live in the classroom. It brought about many challenges. However, it also brought about many new opportunities that when we come back to a normalcy in our classroom, we might want to bring in these new tools. Here are some that many elementary music educators commented on that were positive additions to their classrooms this year and could see using them in the future. Free Tech Tools What I am mentioning here are the tools that we added to make our classrooms adapt to the fact that we could not share items, like instruments, manipulatives, and more. Therefore, we discovered some free tech tools to work around those restrictions and could continue to be used in our future teaching scenarios. • Wheel of Names (wheelofnames.com) - If you have not checked out wheel of names, definitely explore this site. You can make wheels with all of your students’ names in each class. You can then customize the look of the wheel, the speed of the wheel, the music it plays, the applause it gives, and whether it removes the name after it lands on it. Since you can add text or pictures, I have various wheels from an arioso wheel (where I used four emojis and the students have to create a song based on the emojis), a note reading wheel (where I took screen shots from brettpimental.com of the notes on the treble clef staff ), and a rhythm wheel TEMPO 32
(where I took screenshots from rhythmrandomizer. com and the students would perform the pattern that they landed on). This tool can be used in any classroom scenario because you can save the wheels and use them whenever you need (see figure 1).
Figure 1: wheelofnames.com
• Virtual Instruments - I have written and presented about virtual instruments many times this year. Virtual instruments were a game changer because numerous schools issued devices to the students due to the pandemic. They now had a device, but they could not play or share instruments. The solution to this was to have virtual instruments, so that their device became the instrument. Here are some excellent virtual instruments that your students could use immediately: • Playxylo.com - This free site is fabulous. The creators continuously spoke to music educators throughout the year to ask what they needed and improved the site based on their needs. The site currently has diatonic, pentatonic, xylophone colors, boomwhacker colors, monotone colors, and chromatic bars. • Scratch.mit.edu - Music educators have created and OCTOBER 2021
