Educational Technology

Why do I put an emphasis on technology?

Technology allows me to deliver more meaningful, engaging, and fun lessons. It also allows me to create great educational resources and share them in centralized portals. Thanks to technology, I can also keep track of students' learning, design appropriate assessments, and give the students valuable feedback. Below, you can browse some examples of how I use technology in the classroom and help others improve their technological skills.

Highlights

In December 2019, after delivering some professional development sessions on Educational Technology for Dipont Education in China, I decided to create MusicEd Tools, a YouTube channel to share my experience. In May 2020, after watching the first video on the channel, Microsoft Education contacted me to do an online webinar on Innovative Music Education During Distance Learning to share my strategies with a wider audience.

You can find the two videos below. In both of them, you can see how I create, organize, and share content with my students. Also, I explain some ways in which I give interactive and more meaningful feedback to create a learning community in my classroom.

MusicEd Tools

Technological strategies used in my classroom on my YouTube channel, MusicEd Tools

Microsoft Education Webinar

My webinar for Microsoft Education: Innovative Music Education During Distance Learning

Innovative Curriculum

Thanks to technology, I can design innovative music curricula. Contemporary music-making cannot be fully understood without considering its technological aspect. For this reason, I have created several courses on Music Production, which I have been adapting and delivering for the past six years. Students are highly engaged with this part of the curriculum, making it an ideal foundation for songwriting, harmony, melody building, and rhythm, all within the framework of the genre we explore.


Cross-curricular collaboration

If we give students the knowledge and the resources to create, they will. Here is an example of a collaboration I facilitated between my Music Production students and students from Video Production and Visual Arts when teaching in China.

Great student tracking, feedback, and assessment

Technology allows me to frequently assess my students' learning, give them valuable feedback and keep track of their progress with a great level of detail. Consequently, I can tailor my teaching for each class group or a specific student.

I usually give short assessments (≈ 5 min) at the end of every other lesson to have a clear picture of my students' understanding. After months of research and being motivated by online learning, I created a system where my students receive their grades and reports the same day. I can also instantly retrieve a detailed register of their work to plan my review sessions accordingly. This system has proven to work even with a large number of students.

I use several apps and platforms for this purpose, including iDoceo, Bookwidgets, and Google Forms. They all sync to Google Classroom and iDoceo, making students' tracking much more straightforward. I can therefore adapt to their needs almost in real-time, which makes my teaching more effective.

Please check the slideshow on the right to see one of the strategies I use to create assessments, review the results, and generate reports.

Latest Educational Tools

I am constantly exploring the latest educational technology and researching ways to improve my teaching. Here is a list of the software I am currently using to deliver my lessons. This list is not exhaustive, but it considers the apps that I currently use the most.


-Curriculum design and planning: MarginNote, OmniPlan

-Resources: Creating, Organizing, Sharing: OneNote, Google Sites, OmniGraffle

-Tracking, assessment, feedback: Google Classroom, iDoceo, Bookwidgets

-Music Creation: Logic Pro X, Garageband (both for iPad and Laptop), Bandcamp, Bandlab, FL Studio, StudioOne

-Music Theory: OneNote, Google Sites, Tenuto, Theory, RhytmicDictation, Rhythm Trainer, Drumgenius

-Music Analysis: Transcribe!, OneNote, Google Sites, GoodNotes, Notability

-Music Notation: Dorico (both for iPad and laptop), Noteflight

-Musical Vocabulary: OneNote, Google Sites, Quizlet, Kahoot

-Others (connectivity): Audio Hijack, Airserver

Up-to-date Technological Equipment

I work using my own devices, which allows me to keep my workflow as effective as possible. Below, you see an example of my setup in a face-to-face learning environment.