I am going to share the lessons I have been giving my students in hopes that you can either steal them or they inspire you to create something exciting. This is my school’s 3rd week of online learning, as we haven’t had our spring break yet, so for those of you just beginning – maybe you can learn from my issues.
I split my assignments into 2 parts – one assignment serves as their ‘lesson’ time and the other is fulfilling my ‘ensemble rehearsal’ expectations. I usually only see my students once a week for a 20 minute lesson and once a week for a 60 minute band rehearsal.
The first week I was all inspired and took an mp3 of one of the pieces we had been working pretty hard on and popped it up on Google Classroom. I asked my students to create a video recording of themselves playing along with the recording. I thought this would be a great way for them to correct any rhythmic issues they tend to have. This worked out well for some of them, but others were not quite at the level this assignment called for. This is, of course, after we got the Chromebook cameras up and running.
I also asked the students to go https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/note and play until they had 30 correct. They then were asked to take a screenshot of their final score so that I could see how many questions it took for them to get 30 correct. This also worked well, after we got that website unblocked for them on their Chromebooks (I was really batting 1000 on assignments that week).
For my second week of work, I assigned them a movement of one of our easier pieces and had them video record them playing it on their own. The students seemed to develop less frustration with this, however, their rhythms were nowhere near correct. I will have to try something different for next week.
I also asked the students to visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktKcnDfWs2c and comment back to me which music impacted the scene the most, in their opinion. The video is a silent movie scene set to 5 different musical backgrounds. The students can see how drastically music changes the mood of the movies. (We are working on a movie music unit right now, with our Spring Concert theme being “A Night at the Movies”). This was my most completed assignment to date. The students really enjoyed this.
Fast forward to this week – I am now getting clearer with my directions. In every Google assignment box, I break down my instructions into numbered tasks. I am curious to see how this works. I am hoping I will get less students marking each assignment as ‘done’ without actually doing anything.
The assignment this week is to record their piece “Silent Movie” for me with the background music. They were also supposed to go to http://www.musictechteacher.com/music_quizzes/cg_quiz_hoopshoot_rhythms.htm and play the Rhythm Basketball game, but my students’ Chromebooks don’t have Adobe Flash updated on them. I had actually emailed one of my flute students to make sure she could get to the site, so I thought I was all set on this one. I was feeling proud of myself for testing it out BEFORE I sent the assignment out. Until the Flash warning came out. The watch dog company that monitors their Chromebooks are not able to help out with this issue, and laughed at me because of how old and unsupported Flash is. Looks like my students get a free pass on this assignment until I find something else. I wish there were more FUN rhythm work things so that my students could get a bit of a brain break while still learning what I need them to work on!
Car Full of Harmony 
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