Music to My Ears

It is easy to gauge success as a teacher of students. It is harder to gauge success as a technology integration specialist. Why I am thrilled by this success is because this came from the teacher! I only planted a seed awhile ago. But I never said, "Hey, for this assignment why don't you....." Our gifted music teacher did this by herself. She asked for help in its execution, but it was her idea. Hearing her interest in doing this was indeed "music to my ears".

In his SAMR model, Puentedera explains that  the best use of technology falls in the transformative stages of modification and redefinition. In her music composition class, +Michele Zuckman,  gave an assignment that did just this. For starters, she had students use Noteflight to compose their scores. At the very least, this component of the assignment already shifted the learning to the Augmentation level, though I feel parts of it sit at the Modification level as without a keyboard students can compose and then listen to the music they have created, which I feel is significant task redesign. More importantly, using Noteflight (somewhat) easily allowed for the next steps of the assignment of which you will read after the fold.

Using QR Codes

Librarian Gwyneth Jones has created this now widely copied graphic for QR codes. QR codes allow for interactivity which previously was quite difficult to create in class. Imagine any poster project or paper you have kids produce. Teachers often display that work in hallways or within the classroom. Imagine that poster interactive! With a simple wave of the iPad over the qr code, one can see a video of a student explaining his or her work. A student can explain motivations for a story. Imagine an interactive periodic table in science class. Indeed, here is one by teacher, Brady Haren, who encourages folks to print it out and hang in a prominent place. https://www.flickr.com/photos/periodicvideos/5912075438/sizes/o/in/photostream/  

Here is a video of my student explaining how he uses Aurasma, a virtual reality app, to enhance the reader's experience. He uses this in the way I suggest above to make a paper interactive. http://wp.me/s5LnKA-82