Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

This July, I will be teaching a week-long summer course at Central Connecticut State University entitled Podcasts, Blogs, & Wiki’s… Oh My! This summer’s course will focus on using Web 2.0 tools and Ning social networks to extend and support K-College music classes. These tools provide an easy and collaborative way to get your music program online, to create online communities of practice, and to support student assessment.

Come on out to beautiful New Britain, Connecticut. Tuition, including 2 graduate credits, is only $500!

Here’s the official blurb:

Podcasts, Wikis & Blogs—Oh My!
In this hands-on class music teachers will develop strategies to support and extend student learning with online collaborative tools such as social networks, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. These tools provide easy ways to get your music classes online integrating text, video, and audio. Strategies for using these tools to facilitate assessment, writing across the curriculum, and reflective journaling, as well as to support performing, rehearsing, practicing, and composing will be explored. Applications of these tools in settings from elementary through college will be shared and developed. Prerequisite: None. Examples of tools for both Macs and PCs will be shared. Targeted for elementary, middle, high school and college levels, general music or ensembles.

50096 MUS 536, Sec 04, 2 credits, $500
July 7-11, 1:15–5:45 pm & Thurs 7-9:30 pm

More information and registration available at http://www.ccsusmi.com/

As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to better understand how my students think as composer-musicians. I often ask myself questions like:

• What are their conceptions and misconceptions about music and musical process?
  
• What are their challenges in the composing process?
• What are their musical intentions?
  

I have found the following three techniques to provide many insights that have helped me be a better teacher and more importantly, my students to be better peer-teachers.

Composers’ Commentaries

When I watch a DVD, I have the option at the end of the movie (or even at the beginning) to watch the move with overdubbed commentaries by the director and often the actors who made the movie. These commentaries provide additional information and insight into the processes of creating the film. Because I wanted to learn more about what my students were thinking as they composed their pieces and what they thought was important to share with the listeners of their compositions, I ask my students to record an additional commentary track on each of their compositions.

When students are finished with their compositions, they save one version with the commentary, and another without it. Here is an example of a composition entitled Rock to the Beat by one of my 6th grade students, Jessica Walton:

powered by ODEO

What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition?

Here is her piece with her recorded commentary:

powered by ODEO

What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition with recorded commentary?

Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing

When I first discovered the Wikipedia website, I was intrigued by its underlying concept - a website where anyone could easily contribute and collaborate to create an online encyclopedia. One of the first ideas I had a music teacher was to adapt this concept for use to support my students classroom composing experiences. Wouldn’t it be cool to have my students create an online encyclopedia of composing that contained their suggestions for what made a good piece of music and their own successful strategies for composing and working with our composing tools?

Click here to see what they created

Composition Logs

After reading a great online article by writing researcher and educator Katie Wood Ray entitled Read Like a Teacher of Writing, I decided to have my students create composition logs of each etude and composition they created throughout our middle school general music classes. When students start a composition, they begin to fill out their composition log. They revisit this log again when they decide to either abandon or finish their compositions. Here’s a link to the composition log we use:

Our Composition Log