Blog #4

As I’m reading other people’s blogs, I’m beginning to feel frustrated that I am not doing enough technologically with my students. Though I plan to use Joe’s idea of an exploratory Garage Band unit, I won’t be able to get lab space until well into May… and by that time class will be over. Don’t get me wrong – I’m definitely learning a ton and I’m most certainly getting better at navigating the technology I use for and with my classes; it’s just that compared to my classmates I don’t feel like I’m doing what I need to do with having my students actually use the technology with me. I’m using the knowledge I’m acquiring in this class to increase my own productivity and enhance what I’m teaching… But like Jan, I’m just not sure I envision using wikis, blogs, etc. with my K-5 music students.

I know that we are supposed to be doing a more thorough job of logging our time spent and the details, so I’m going to try to tackle that now. This week, I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels more than any other week. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to embed audio into my Facebook page, only to find that apparently many of the applications that had been used in the past have now been shut down by Facebook because of copyright infringement. I actually have some recordings of my senior piano recital in college that I thought would be really cool to upload and share with people (no copyright there! I’m pretty sure the Bach family doesn’t collect royalties!), but unfortunately the applications I’ve researched so far will not let me do anything more than post a song by a current artist. Ilike and lastfm are two applications I’ve tried. Now I’m in the process of using another one called Babulous, which is supposed to give me the option to download (or upload) one song for my Facebook profile. The application appears to have uploaded the file from my computer, but does not respond when clicked. Very frustrating. I’ve looked into trying to upload audio to my blog as well, but it doesn’t appear to be any easier, and frankly, I think it would be more fun to be able to share audio on Facebook since it’s something more people will actually see. But it’s looking more and more like I’m going to have to just record my voice on Audacity and upload that to my blog to meet this particular class requirement. If anyone has had any luck with other methods, I’d be interested to hear what you did. It seems like video – though not a piece of cake by any means – is a lot easier to manipulate. Would you agree?

Speaking of trouble with audio files, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time these past couple weeks trying to get around the whole mp3 vs. m4a file issue. I know I mentioned this during our web class, so I’ll try to be brief. It appears that mp3 and m4a files aren’t allowed to be embedded into powerpoint (I get an error every time), whereas wav files have that capability. So I figured out a way to open mp3 files in Audacity and export them as wav files. Though it wasn’t difficult, it was definitely annoying because it was just one more step. THEN I found that m4a files did not respond the same way when opened in Audacity. It was like the audio file gods knew I had gotten away with something and they were bound and determined that I wouldn’t do it again! ARG! Why were audio files even coming up as m4a? It made no sense! At first I thought maybe only files I had just recently purchased were labeled m4a, but then noticed that even some audio I had created myself (on audacity) were also m4a when I pulled them out of Itunes. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this – I’m not sure if it had anything to do with the latest updates to Itunes or what, but it has definitely made for a more time-consuming process of embedding audio. Soooo…. the way I’ve now gotten around the m4a issue is to create a playlist in Itunes of all the stuff I planned to embed, then burn it all to a CD and redownload it all back onto my computer. What a pain. I’m really not trying to steal anything – it’s all legitimately purchased/owned stuff. I’m just hoping to get rid of a few steps (minimizing powerpoint, finding the song in Itunes, pushing play, maximizing powerpoint, etc.) to make my classes run more smoothly. I mean, the few things I’ve had the fortune to be able to embed in powerpoint have been incredibly handy. Kids are staying on task because they aren’t waiting around for me to get the CD playing or the computer on track. The song just plays, and they follow along singing the words on powerpoint. At any rate, it has been HOURS of time outside of class to save minutes (seconds?) of in class time. Not sure it’s been worth it, but I’m kind of enjoying the challenge. And I’ll say it again: It’s good to have the push from this class to make the time to mess with this stuff.

That’s all for now. I can’t believe I’ve been rambling so long. And I still have two blogs to go. Hopefully with the next one I will be able to get more into the reading. J