The use of audio in my KLA (Arts/Music) is probably the most important multimedia tool that I will use in my education experiences. Not only is using audio engaging students without getting them to do a lot of work, just sit and listen, but they can relate to sound the easiest: it’s something we do from the very beginning of our cognitive development.
Fasso (2013) suggests that if we don’t focus on multimodal
literacies in the 21st century, we are not catering for our
students. Audio literacy forms part of that multimodal literacy and we must
integrate it into our educational experiences. Thankfully, music is an auditory
art form, tailor-made for the inclusion of audio ICT’s.
There are, of course, issues involved with using audio as a
ICT tool. These are the same as the issues I mentioned in my post on images, with a lesser focus on the student privacy (can’t be
seen in audio).
There are a lot of ways I can implement audio into my
teaching. Here are a select few:
- Using audio to provide examples of musical concepts in a blog (e.g. timbre of instruments).
- Getting students to record themselves playing instruments, whether they use low level software (voice-record) or high end Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software like ProTools or Logic Pro, and upload them to an online space.
- Students recording themselves in performance and then critically reviewing their performance for improvement.
- Uploading a series of recordings (with permission) for students to use in critical analysis assessment.
An activity we were assigned to do for this task was to
upload an audio recording of our voice. As a music major, this was something
that I’ve done a thousand times, and as I have original music recorded, I
decided to upload that to my wiki page. You can find a copy of one of my original big band recordings here.
Further use of audio in ICT’s includes Podcasting. Podcasts,
I believe, can be explained as sound file that is part of a large series,
updated regularly through the internet – like an audio magazine subscription.
There are an abundance of Podcasts on the internet, but a main source of them
is at the Apple iTunes Store. Podcasts seem to have an unending number of
topics, and there a lot of great educational podcasts that can benefit
learners. I went searching through the iTunes Store, and came up with the
following list for Music education:
- https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/learn-jazz-piano/id129064415?mt=2
- https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/the-sonny-rollins-podcast/id163762802?mt=2
- https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/jazzstories/id405068170?mt=2
- https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/brooklyn-jazz-underground/id204348393?mt=2
Podcasts could be used to enrich learning as homework
experiences or as main content in lesson structures. Depending on the quality
of the podcasts, they are often updated regularly and are quite entertaining.
Downsides include length – some are up to 45 minutes long of just audio. This
isn’t very engaging. An activity we were given to do was make our own podcast.
There are a lot of free tools to use on the Internet and we were suggested to
use PodOMatic. This tool was very easy to
use and quite fun in hindsight – I can easily see myself asking my students to
create a podcast as a term long class activity. Here is an embedded player of
my podcast I created.
Here is the link to my podcast website: http://rosscgdlt.podomatic.com/
The following SWOT Analysis summarises the various positives
and negatives of using audio as a classroom tool.
Strengths
- Numerous applications in music
- Interactive and easily engaging without effort
- Can explain a lot with audio (non language)
- Podcasts contain a lot of excellent learning materials that are updated regularly
- Easily scaffold-able
Weaknesses
- Permissions, Liscencing and Safety
- 45-minute podcasts of just talking can get very boring
Opportunities
- Students can record music for assessment
- Students can record performances for analysis
- Students can make podcasts for term long projects (like an audio blog)
- Audio Textbooks
Threats
- Can be ineffective learning tools via lack of scaffold
- May become detriment to content and ways of working (TPCK)
References
Fasso, W. (2013). Digital
tool 5: podcasting. Retrieved from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491 ICT’s
for Learning Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=115359
Excellent use of SWOT tool Ross. Have you seen Jam Trax software for making music? The beauty of this is it creates a wav file that is all their own and avoids copyright issues.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work.