Interacting & Visualizing (Getz)

SOFTWARE TOOL: Flat.io

PRESENTATION TOOL: Prezi.com

My Presentation: Basic Scale Patterns (Music Theory)

For this challenge, I wanted to tackle the abstract concept of music scales. Now, for anyone who has a music degree, who has taken 5-10 years of piano lessons, or who is even remotely inquisitive about the how/what/why of music, this probably won't seem like an abstract concept. However, I can assure you that, to roughly 90% of any general music classroom, this is an extremely abstract concept. We, as teachers, have been taught to hammer scales home as the foundational building blocks of music, but usually the only feedback we get from students is apathy at best.

Personally, I love scales, and I love music theory, and I want all of my students to grasp the joy and freedom that comes to a musician when they truly understand how music works.

Thanks to some great tech tools, I think we can now make that a reality for our students.

For this lesson, I utilized the notation software program Flat.io. It is very straightforward, user-friendly, and one can create an account and begin writing music within seconds. I also chose Prezi.com for my presentation tool because I feel that is a highly visual format that will hold my student's attention. (I personally believe that the more energy we put into making presentations visually awesome and entertaining, the students have a better chance of being equally excited about gleaning that information...but that's a soapbox for another lesson).

This lesson is designed for both an in-person workshop format, or a remote-learning, flipped-classroom model.

The students click through the slides of the Prezi (along with a few embedded YouTube videos) and follow the on-screen prompts to engage with Flat.io. At the end, there is an open-ended "experiment time!" built in so that students who are itching for the green light can be let loose to creatively explore the program.

I have found notation programs to be extremely helpful in explaining music theory concepts because of the Playback function. I can input notes into the program, explain the theory concept behind what I'm doing, and then have the students instantly hear how that sounds in real time. When I was in middle school, my parents got me my first notation software for Christmas, and that completely launched me into a self-discovery, music composition phase that I've never really gotten out of. I hope that my students can find a similar passion by engaging with these incredible programs and utilizing the technology to their advantage.