Best of the Elementary Music Technology Discovered During the Pandemic - Amy M. Burns

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 (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).

• 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

Figure 1: wheelofnames.com

shared many virtual instruments. By performing a quick search, you can find numerous instruments to share with your students to use in class. To level up the activity, have your older elementary students learn some of the basics of coding and have them code their own instrument.

• My google slides instrument closet (https://docs. google.com/presentation/d/1hqlTlTh2OWIvbhr

CCkCOM-A1v7tBBquWlEW-5iityYU/copy) - I created this last year and shared it as a google slide forced copy and as a Seesaw Activity (see figure 2). • Virtual instruments can continue to be used as a supplement for classrooms that do not have enough instruments, for music educators who are on a cart and pushing into the classroom, and for students to experience instruments that they might not normally have access to.

Canva (https://www.canva.com/education/)

As one music educator stated in June of 2021, “Canva is a game changer!” Canva is that one-stop shop where you can find pictures, elements, graphics, and more to create your manipulatives, slides, virtual classrooms, and more. Canva has various versions from free to pro, but it also has an educator’s version where you get more tools than you would with the free version. Canva also has the ability to connect to your bitmoji so you can intuitively add it to your slide and you can record audio, add video, create a slideshow, create a video, create gifs, and so much more. One example in my classroom is performing the movement activity, “Statues in the Park.” There are many variations to this like “Dancing Freeze”, but the gist of it is you play various styles of music, the students move to the music, and you pause it numerous times so that they can freeze like a statue. I adore using statue cards and displaying them on screen for the students to easily see from anywhere in the classroom. My statue cards have been mostly stick figures, as the ones included in my book, Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches. However, I really wanted to use statue cards so that the students could see themselves represented in the pictures. I went to Canva and searched out various movement poses from people found all around the world (see figure 3). These are wonderful visuals for the students to emulate, as well as see themselves in the photographs. Canva is free and I truly believe that it is a game changer in the music classroom.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Learning Management Systems became a necessity during remote learning as it was the way that we could give students materials, assignments, retrieval practice, and more. These LMS can continue as they are a great way for students to access work from home, to continue their ukulele and recorder studies, to create work with multiple modalities (i.e., Seesaw gives students 6 different tools to use to create), be in contact with the teacher, and turn in work at any time. Continuing to use Google Classrooms, Seesaw, Canvas, Schoology, MusicFirst, and more, give students more opportunities to explore and work on their music assignments.

Collaborative Music Making Sites There are many collaborative music making sites that are accessible and intuitive to use by elementary students. The first one that comes to mind is Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/ Song-Maker/). The teacher can share a song where the students have to fill in the melody. For example, they could create a melody like “Bounce High Bounce Low”

Figure 2: Virtual Instrument Closet

Figure 3: Canva Statue Cards

and leave out “la” (see figure 4). The students can use this to listen and add “la” in the appropriate place. Then, add a drum line and share it back to the teacher and with their classmates. There are also sites like Noteflight Learn (https://www.noteflight.com/learn) and Flat (https://flat. io/). Though their education versions are not free, they give the students the ability to collaborate on musical compositions. Plus, sites like Soundtrap EDU (https:// www.soundtrap.com/edu/) and Bandlab EDU (Bandlab EDU is free, https://edu.bandlab.com/) allow students to create and make music together. This past year, when the students were remote, concurrent, or in class social distancing, these collaborative music making tools were wonderful. I also allowed the students to use the chat function and their discussions about their music were eye-opening. Though this might not be a feasible option for everyone, it is an option that levels up the music making process as students can work with not only their peers in their classroom, but can connect to students in other classrooms and schools to create and make music.

There are plenty of more technology tools that came from our teaching during a pandemic that can be utilized in our future teaching scenarios. I have been creating numerous YouTube episodes titled, “Best of #Elmused Pandemic Tech” which explore more tools. Please feel free to check them out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdoSkMqMVUzTsiWdj3HN5Ug

My philosophy is one that if technology gives you the opportunity to do something that could not be done traditionally, and it will connect with your students, then it is worth the effort to try it. It always comes back to your goal with the students and if technology is a tool that can assist with the goal.

Want to find the links in this article in one place? Go to http://amymburns.com/resources, click on NJ Tempo October 2021.

Figure 4: Chrome Music Lab Song Maker "Bounce High Bounce Low" Amy M. Burns has taught elementary general music for over 25 years at Far Hills Country Day School, a preschool through grade eight private school in Far Hills, NJ. She is the Preschool-8 General Music Chair on the NJMEA Board. She has authored four books on how to integrate tech into the elementary music classroom. She has presented many sessions on the topic, including four keynote addresses in TX, IN, St. Maarten, and AU. She is the recipient of the 2005 TI:ME Teacher of the Year, 2016 NJ Master Music Teacher, 2016 Governor’s Leader in Arts Education, and the 2017 NJ Nonpublic School Teacher of the Year Awards. Her most recent publication, Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches (2020), published by Oxford University Press (OUP) is available from OUP and Amazon.