Technology Blog 1: Chapter 2, A Common Language and What It Means to My Music Degree

 Hello all! I found the directions a bit confusing and I'm hoping that I went about this the right way. Here's my introduction video and I will be posting this to our discussion board. Cannot wait to get into this semester and virtually meet everyone, Thank you!

"Developing A Connected Learning Model" Was our most recent chapter in which we learned about collaboration through learning as well as many other independent and two-way techniques to take a different perspective on teaching the information that students are learning. It goes back in this chapter to list and briefly explain ways that we have developed our educators in the recent past. These developments include passive workshops, Colleagues, Students and popular media. In addition to these mediums, there as countless other forms of networking that can help improve an educators general connection the the environment around them. on Page 29, we speak of professional learning communities and how they run with the goals of continuous improvement, shared leadership, and school reform. "Continuous inquiry, participate in thoughtful conversation about their professional learning, devise strategies to improve instruction."(Pg29) Chapter 2 is eluding to the fact that these professional learning communites have the best rate of success and improvement amongst their students. All in all this chapter brought light to different styles of education and their effects and drawbacks. Deeper into the article, we begin to get into how technology aids the educators of our world today. From givng young kinds ipads to experiment on to having access to a PC at school from a young age, this generation of educators have everything at their disposal as far as technology. Without taking an opinion on the matter, this much exposure to technology allows for never before seen progress with the minimum time for information processing getting lower and lower in these childrens brains. This of course can create the problem of dependence of technolgy from both the educator and students' perspectives. From the students perspective, dependence looks like a lack of attention span and an inability to process information as quickly in real life as they can on the screen. From the educator's perspective it looks like isolation and not being able to take advice from your colleagues or the people around you. This type of professional isolation makes these educators miss out on providing something meaningful to their teaching community. As a music performance major who plans to get my teaching certification, this is quite interesting. As far as instrumental learning goes there's not too many electronic mediums to teach with. This makes it so that the community of local music teachers are always sharing ideas and taking critcism. Because of how physical learning music is, you can typically feel a strong reaction to information (or music in this case) that's inspiring to you. When one music educator in the community teaches something that illicits a reaction from the entire class, you can guarantee that teacher is taking that piece of information straight to his teaching community. This is so that everyone in this community can connect with their students in that same, if not a similar, way. When I start getting into teaching, i'm going to be looking for new fascinating ways to give private lessons with the aide of technology. There's already so mnay great resources available for music teachers and I feel as if I'm capable of inventing a new teaching platform for music online. With the information in this chapter, it feels as if all I need is a strong teaching community and access to resources and I can be as successful as I want to be.