The Finish Line is In Sight

Well, we've almost reached our final destination so I thought it would be nice if I wrote a semifinal blog entry. Over the course of this summer I think I have learned an immense amount of information that will be very useful for when I go out into the teaching world. This class has proved to be especially useful because I've been able to spend so much time working with technologies that will be faced daily in my life as a teacher. I would have to say that my favorite activity was making the iMovie. Following that, I would say that using google docs will be very helpful in my future as both a student and a teacher. Activities and lessons are always much easier to plan with others when you can work collaboratively on the same project and see constant updates as to what's happening in the lesson.

Hopefully I will be able to continue to grow in my amount of resources for the future, especially in my knowledge of current technologies and I would like to continue learning new things every day for the rest of my career. :)

iMovie Extravaganza!

We've spent the last two classes working on our iMovies and I have to admit, I've had a really fun time working on these. I think video making equipment has always been pretty easy for me to use, and I'd really like to use iMovie again in the future to create more movies for personal and educational purposes. My iMovie I made for IT486 includes a group of pictures I took on my trip to Ireland my freshman year of college. I traveled there with the Pride of the Southland Marching Band in order to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Dublin. It was a wonderful experience and I would really like to go back to Ireland one day. It's nice that I was able to do this project in 486 because I think I'm really going to be able to enjoy this video and remember all the fun times I had in Ireland that year.




I think iMovie will prove to be especially useful in the field of music education because you can easily use it to create videos which demonstrate instrument holding, posture, and other aspects of playing a musical instrument. And seeing as how audio is a big part of iMovie, it will be good that the kids will be able to see and hear different examples of playing and instruments.

I've created movies before using iMovie, but when I created them I was using the camera built into my computer to record live events. Here's a link to one of my videos. Yes, it is terrible playing, but this was a video taken in the process of myself learning to play the trombone. (definitely not my best instrument!) :) And that's also why the camera is not pointed at my face...I'm fairly ashamed of how bad it sounds, but I guess I shouldn't expect too much when I'd only been playing the trombone for about a week! I've done a number of movies using iMovie before to turn in for playing tests, but I've never used iMovie in the way I used it for this class before.

So close, yet so far away...

We're halfway done with IT486. So far we've done a TON of different activities and used a plethora of programs and with each one we've used, I've found positives and negatives. Like most technology, there have been several points of frustration. Google docs has some issues with formatting that made me pretty irritated, but I managed to reformat everything and get my task accomplished. Voice threads was an interesting tool, but it seems like a lot of the really cool features are only available if you pay for the subscription. I've used picasa before, but only on my personal computer, not using the web albums. It was a really easy tool to use, as is almost everything I've found using Google.

I'm excited to be finishing up our wiki. The finally product should look really nice and have some very useful links as resources for the different fields of music education. But I have to admit, I can't wait to finish up with summer classes though and take a break before school starts back up again! :)

Music Scavenger Hunt

We went on a scavenger hunt around UT's campus in search of musical instruments and accessories. Upon returning to class we uploaded all of our images into a program called Voice Thread which allowed us to make comments on the pictures via typing and also voice recordings. It's a pretty neat little program with quite a few cool features for free.

Digital Image Collection

This is my collection of images. The pictures are fairly diverse, but essentially cover a lot of my interests.

To blog or not to blog?

That's not really the question! :) Thus far I have learned quite a few new things in IT 486. As it turns out, there is more to the internet than I was ever aware of! I have found that wikis are quite frustrating and entertaining at the same time. It's interesting to watch other classmates and students from other sections uploading their information onto the wiki and I find that so far it seems to be a good tool for us to learn from each other.

Google docs seems like a pretty nifty tool, and seeing as how I'm already a google fanatic and I've had a gmail account for years now, it feels like I should have known about google docs for years now!

I'm most looking forward to my finalized wiki. I have a feeling it's going to look fantastic and have a wide variety of helpful information and links for music students and teachers alike.

What's happenin' internet?

Here I am starting up yet another web-page on the world wide web, which we all know is already full of tons of fascinating pages! :) I'm hoping to utilize this page to its fullest extent while in the IT 486 class and to possibly find and share with other Music Education students and graduates.

My technology background is fairly good, and I've always prided myself with being able to keep up with just about any new device that is thrown at me. I have to admit that I am a huge fan of Mac products, but I can still easily find my way around a PC since I was born and raised on them. As far as the world of the internet is concerned, I have gone through many, many social networking systems, beginning with Xanga way back in the day and moving on to Myspace, Facebook, and I've even had a few blogs before in my life. (not that I can remember their urls or passwords of course). For this IT 486 course I am most interested in seeing how these past experiences I have can be used in addition to the information I will gain from this experience to expand my technology knowledge.