Sharing is Caring

During this week, we had the chance to play around with social bookmarking and leaning how to share the information that is beneficial to teachers. As reflected in my previous blog posts, there is a lot of technology available for teachers to improve and enhance their lessons in all grades. Social bookmarking is a great way to share what works with others around us. Using the website Diigo (www.Diigo.com), it is shown how easy that can be. Not only can you share your own ideas and information, but you can make connections with other teachers with similar groupings. Sharing information is the next step in letting technology work for us. We as teacher need to utilize these collaborative sights to keep the interest in our teaching!

These ideas can also help us develop responding to music. "Having the ability to mentally represent sound through words, and perhaps images, is crucial to musical understanding" (Bauer, 2014, p. 109). Technology can add creativity to lessons that deal with responding. One of these way is by using the program Zaption (www.Zaption.com). This is a program where teachers can make viewing videos from sites like YouTube more interactive and more educational. I know I would have benefited from a program such as this. To get an idea of how it works, check out the "tour" I created

http://zapt.io/texusqg2

As you can see, I used this program to make an interactive response to a recording of a piece of music that my students were learning. This program can also be incorporated in other programs like my History of Rock and Roll class. I have shown so many music videos, and I am very excited at the thought of making them more interactive through Zaption.

I think we need to remember that even though the amount of information out there can be overwhelming, we can rely on each other to make sense of it all. We can find what works and share it so easily! "Social bookmarking not only helps user track, and later retrieve, online resources they discover, but it is also a way for people to work together to share and learn about valuable information, tools, and services on the Internet" (Bauer, 2014, p. 42).

Resources:
Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.