Technology Assisted Music Learning Development: Module 7

For this week’s blog, I will take an alternative approach. Among the assignments for this module were to create a quiz using Google Forms, create a newsletter, a presentation, and a calendar using Google Drive, with the focus being music assessment and administrative and personal productivity tools.

After completing the given assignments using Google tools, I found myself searching for additional Google tools that may be useful for me. The reason being that these were all so easy to use, accessible, and would not only assist me with assessment, but make a huge impact on my personal and professional productivity. I am seasoned enough to remember well how difficult it was for teachers to gain access to copying technology – pre-copier days! While in elementary school, I helped teachers by using the mimeograph machine, and the distinctive odor of the chemical mixture. In the past 10-15 years, I have largely ignored the personal and professional productivity tools available, mainly due to my assumption that such tools would be cost-prohibitive, as they once were.

This week’s blog is necessarily brief because of time constraints. I have two meaty projects due, a late start on both of them, and one of the three days remaining before these projects are due already committed to traveling.

I feel compelled to comment on the evolution of my personal attitudes toward this course. From the very outset of the course, the necessity to learn a multitude of new software became apparent. During a discussion with my dearest friend who is the same age as I am, I remember making the comment that “I am too old for all of this!” with her reply empathizing with my mindset. In my younger years, I embraced any new technology to which I could gain access, but as I became more comfortable with the knowledge base I had acquired, at a certain point new tools seemed more of a burden than of a benefit. In particular, the advent of the Blackberry and the prevalent use of it for calendar purposes by most of the professional parents of my students is memorable. My calendar was a simple unzip, open, and view or write; theirs was a series of navigation on a tiny device that took them a great deal longer to record an event than did my device.

Practice at a given task causes one to become more facile with the task. So it is with learning new software or internet tools. My attitude of “not four more programs to learn!” has morphed into an attitude of eager anticipation. I am truly excited about using Google Classroom to manage my class piano teaching! What an excellent tool that will be; and three months ago I never would have dreamed that it would be so very easy to do. Instead of the technology being more cumbersome and time-consuming, as it was in the first years of the Blackberry, the available technology is not only far more user-friendly, but is either free or very low cost. After a brief hiccup of more than a decade, I’m welcoming myself to the 21^st century.