Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

I’ve blogged before about using social networking technology to extend and support learning in music classes. When I was teaching middle school general music, I used a custom website with a third-party blog, multimedia player, and wiki. Since then, I’ve continued using social technologies with my college classes, and most recently with Ning.

Ning has been a great platform for setting up private social networks for my college classes. I use it as the online presence for all the classes I teach, rather than courseware tools like Moodle or Blackboard, because of its ease of use, clean design and integrated audio and video players and storage. What before took a lot of third party tools and time to code and program a website is simplified with Ning. My students and I log in to one site and set up our own personalized profiles to share, discuss, collaborate, and reflect on our compositions, teaching, or readings for class. Anecdotally, my students spend more time on class material responding to posts, sharing their music and providing feedback to each other on their peer teaching videos… most of it outside of class time.

I recently shared how I have been using these social networking technologies with faculty and students at Shenandoah Conservatory and at the University of Illinois. When speaking with music education majors and local teachers, many saw the potential of sites like Ning to support learning in K-12 schools, but rightly expressed reservations about the advertising and some of the design features of Ning. (Thanks to Steve Hargadon at http://education.ning.com/ for sharing that Ning now will eliminate the ads for K-12 Ning sites!!!) These concerns may now be set aside with a new private social network platform designed specifically for K-12 at http://www.imbee.com/.

Imbee has many of the same features of Ning, including blogs with integrated audio and video players/storage, but without advertising. Imbee also has intriguing and extensive parental and teacher controls. Each student account is connected to a “parent sponsor” who has ultimate administrative control over the content for his or her student or child. The design of the site is also kid friendly with bright colors and a clean layout. Take a spin over to Imbee.com and take their tour!

Mojiti.com and Ning.com

Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:

• Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
• In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
• In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.

Click here to see Mojiti in action.

Ning.com (special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.

The MENC Creativity Special Research Interest Group (SRIG) just launched their new website: http://www.musicalcreativity.com. This website is a great resource for teachers and researchers who are interested in issues related to musical creativity and resources for the classroom.

The first featured newsletter is written by Dr. Susan Mills from Appalachian State University. Be sure to check out her ideas for arranging and composing in the classroom

I currently serve as Web Editor for MusicalCreativity.com. So, if you have any feedback or suggestions for content, please feel free to email me and let us know. Also, if you have something to contribute, please email our Creativity SRIG Chair Michele Kaschub.