MATCH 2015

Music and Technology Conference Houston 2015

Wow- what a great tech day long conference! This past weekend I attended this very first Music and Technology mini conference. The organizers did a fabulous job arranging this mini conference for the area music teachers. I had the honor of presenting two sessions; Music Centers with Limited Technology and Take Me to the Computer Lab! The two sessions were kind of related to one another since I felt the tools, etc., could be used alone by one person or with a group. I used Tackk to house my agenda and links for both sessions. Below are links to each presentation.

Music Centers with Limited Technology

Take Me to the Computer Lab!

Highlights of the day were the two keynote speakers: Amy Burns and Cherie Herring. Always a pleasure listening to what these two have to say.

Collaboration

One of the things I have been getting my middle school students to do is collaboration on documents for their work. And it has worked out surprisingly well! Some of the tools we ave used for collaboration are: Google Docs, Google slides, Padlet, and just collaborating inside of Edmodo.
The Google products are very easy to use because of the larger work area. Although the doc was tricky since I limited them to keeping all the work on one page. Padlet is a nice area to share information. Depending on the layout of the posts (I used stream) this can have an effect on the organization. One of my favorite collaboration projects was to work in their small group in Edmodo doing research about the history of Big Tex. Their group had to divide the jobs up and only one person could input the information on the timeline. (We use the timeline from ReadWriteThink. Excellent resource.) The info that they found had to be posted in their small group for the Timeline person. They also had to find links to images to use. The project worked well and everyone's timelines turned out nicely. I believe that teaching students to work in collaborative groups is an important skill and helps them become an asset to their future employers.