The perennial discussion to cut school music in BC

Updated April 17
It seems that every few years in this province of BC we encounter a movement that wishes to cut the "frills" from education in order to balance the books at local school boards. The latest is the City of Vancouver, you know that town here on the west coast that hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics just a few short years ago. It seems that Vancouverites can'f afford to pay for the "frills" otherwise known as those arts, music and library programs that essentially are what distinguish humans from primates.

But from this morning's Vancouver Sun it looks like Vancouver's difficulties are just the beginning tell-tale signs of the massive underfunding of our provincial education system by our provincial government.

But is the province entirely to blame? Juxtapose this with the costs of administration at VSB, look at the number of employees making more than $150,000 per year.  Actually there are 174 people at VSB making more than $100,000 per year. You can look up this information by going here.

If one looks through the contents of this blog one will find much compelling evidence as to the importance of music education and the arts in general.

But if anyone still needs convincing, here is yet another article that deals with the current crisis created by chronic underfunding by our Provincial Government and a lack of cognitive ability at the VSB.

Anyway, just so we can remind ourselves, here are some reasons why music education is an important component of every child's development.

From http://trainingthemusicalbrain.blogspot.ca/ http://trainingthemusicalbrain.blogspot.ca/2014/04/in-support-of-school-band.html   here is some more scientific rational as to why we need music in our schools.

Benefits of Musical Training on Cognitive Function and Emotional Well-Being

Musical training enhances auditory processing, leading to better verbal skills and increased reading ability:

• Musical training enhances brainstem auditory responses to both speech and music.  Musicians have better encoding of pitch information in speech, which is important for understanding what is being said, as well as the emotional content of speech. (Musacchia et al.,2007; Strait et al., 2009)

• Musicians are better able to filter away background noise, and so can better encode and understand speech in the presence of background noise (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009)

• Adults who had musical training as a child (but did not necessarily continue playing music as an adult) still have better brainstem responses to sound.  This indicates that changes in the brain in response to early musical training are long-lasting.(Skoe and Kraus, 2012)

• Musical training protects against the normal age-related decline in auditory processing.  Older musicians show the same accurate processing of sounds as young people.  This effect of musical training is not limited to professional or life-long-musicians.  Even a few years of musical training during childhood had a protective effect on auditory processing in seniors, even 50 years later.  (Parbery-Clark et al., 2012; White-Schwoch et al., 2013)

• University students with musical training before the age of 12 had better verbal memory  than people with no musical training (Chan et al., 1998)

• Children  with at least 3 years of musical training performed better on vocabulary tests than children with no musical training.There was a positive correlation between duration of musical study and performance on test; in other words, the longer the child had studied music, the more likely she was to do well on the vocabulary test. (Forgeard et al., 2008)

There is much more folks, follow the link here.... to find the rest of this article

The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments

Matt Locke originally came up with the concept of the Six Spaces of Social Media. Evan McIntosh added a seventh earlier this year, Data Spaces, and ideas about how education could harness these spaces, and the various transgressions between them, for learning.

This short presentation tackles the potential of adjusting our physical school environments to harness technology even better. What happens when we map technological spaces to physical ones?


The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.

tech tools for teachers

Thanks to Dan Roberts for putting together this great list of tools for classroom teaching. It seems we may still be in the infant stage of exploring how the net can serve as a giant communication tool, these sites below give us even more creative ways we can have our students interact and work with each other. Bring it on!

These tools are all free, easy to use, easy to access and can be used in any subject at any age to enhance the learning experience.

1. Wallwisher http://www.wallwisher.com/
Is a great little Web 2.0 tool principally for collaboration. You have a virtual wall where you can post little post it notes on to it although these are not like the normal yellow sticky notes you get as because they are online instead of just writing text you can add links to websites, images, music, audio podcasts and even videos. You can visit the example of the wallwisher one of my classes used here as a starter activity to a new topic: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/jameshutton

2. Photopeach http://www.photopeach.com/
Photopeach is basically a really easy, free to use tool to produce slide shows a bit like photostory apart from you can chose music from the library that is has so in some ways also like animoto but less fancy transitions. The best bit that I love about photopeach is the two added little extras that they have at the end. The first is that at the end of your show you can add a quiz section where you write questions and then the audience get to select multiple choice answers and see if they are right. I think that this is a great way to get students to test other students knowledge which could also be really useful for revision not only for the student creating the show who has to come up with suitable questions but also for the ones watching it making them think of the answers. The second is that at the end of watching you then have the option of leaving a comment like you can on most of the video/show type sites however this is different as when you leave a comment it stays on the video itself as if you were watching the credits. I think this has great potential for peer assessment and peer feedback and think it is just awesome. Here is an example of one students work. http://photopeach.com/album/blo8nv 

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Changing face of education: Clickers in the Classroom

The way we conduct the processes of classroom education is changing. Technology is finding its way into classrooms in new and more interactive ways. Here is another example: from the New York Times:

If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

In Professor White’s 90-minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to “grab your clickers” to provide feedback

Read the article - New York Times, November 15, 2010

What Makes a Great Teacher?

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t.

The answer seems the the success of the classroom is tied directly to the effectiveness of the teacher. Socio-economic factors matter of course, but good teaching as illustrated by examples in the article is more about what happens in the classroom than it is about the circumstances of the child or the school.

Great teachers tend to set big goals for themselves and their students. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.


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