Web 2.0 is an ever changing medium that can assist teachers and their effectiveness in many valuable ways. Over the last six weeks I have embarked on a quest to seek out some of the best and most current web 2.o sites that teachers can use for this purpose. For my final reflection I'd like to highlight a few of my discoveries and share my thoughts on them as far as how I can use them as a music educator and also how teachers in general can use them.
One of the best web 2.0 discoveries that I found was the delicious.com website. This was a great site for keeping track of the endless amount of websites available to teachers on the net. One of the great features that I love about delicious is its ability to integrate with Firefox (my internet browser). Also the fact that my bookmarks can be viewed and used by other delicious users adds an element of community that is particularly characteristic of web 2.0. I was actually able to find some fascinating links by the use of this tagging feature. Truly it's a site that I will visit very often in the future, I'll just have to be careful to not spend too much time on it!
Another web 2.0 resource that I found very useful as a result of this journey was the web-quest project that I worked on with another colleague of mine on wetpaint.com. Because we are both music teachers we were able to design a very organized web-quest that takes students through discovering the different musical elements and how they are used in all forms of music. Because I believe learning happens best through self-motivated discovery, this by design is one of the best teaching tools I have ever seen. It does have its limitations however, because to use this in a general music classroom you must have access to enough computers and a fast enough internet connection in order for all students to participate. However, it has been in my experience that educational institutions (schools particularly) are always seeking to keep up with current technology, thus limited access is becoming less the norm and more a rarity.
Overall I would say this this journey has been a very useful and productive one. I have discovered some very valuable resources, this blog being one of them! In fact before taking this class, I have never blogged before. Now I may be much more inclined to read some of the posts on the choralnet.org "choral blog" and search it for useful information regarding conducting. I'd like to thank Dr. Yang for his valuable feedback regarding each of the projects that I worked on and Mr. Edele for his collaboration as we created the web-quest. If I ever have the opportunity to explore current technology programs and how they can be used to benefit music education I would jump at the chance!
