Sounding the Teaching III: Facilitating Music Learning with Music Tec Sounding The Teaching III | 页面 22

SOUNDING THE TEACHING III /
EXPOSITION
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this project has given an
insight into the usually unseen process that
students undergo to make musical decisions
and the issues they face during a music
arrangement task on DAWs.
• Students seem drawn to the process of
exploring instrumental timbre.
• They need time to explore and make
musical decisions, and the process
differs with each student.
• They resort to deleting work in its
entirety rather than refine their work.
• They are not able to, on their own, apply
concepts from an instructional video on
their music decision-making.
The implications are that:
• In future music arrangement tasks,
teachers may give more time for an
exploration of instrumental timbre
and provide listening examples to
instrumental timbre in different musical
contexts before and/or as students work
on their arrangements. This exposure
will enrich students’ musical diet that
could lead to more appropriate musical
decisions.
• More instruction or support (such as
video/slide tutorials) to enable students
to understand the process of editing so
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that they have more options than simply
deleting their work in its entirety.
• While there are lesson and curriculum
objectives, each student’s creative
process is different and hence
apportioning more time to support
students as they work, rather than
instructing the class as a whole (which
assumes everyone learns at the same
pace), could offer more opportunities for
them to receive individualised help to
personalise their learning.
• While resources such as video
guides provide support for students’
independent work, they should not be
seen as a crutch. They should point
students towards “how to do” instead
of “what to do” and teachers could
encourage original and creative ideas
from students.
Apart from the themes that I have found
in this study, there could be other aspects
in students’ musical decision-making
since this study focused on a small group
and students worked on the same song.
The understanding that students’ musical
decision-making process is personal and
complex made me consider how the use
of technology should not be about the
hardware or software, but why and how
we use it for our teaching and learning. It is
how we are going to enable our students to
be better musicians and make meaningful
musical decisions.
REFERENCES
Byrne, J. (2018). Learning narratives pave way to modify computer compositional strategies. In E. Himonides,
A. King & F. Cuadrado (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sempre MET2018: Researching Music, Education, Technology
(pp. 53-56). London: University College London.
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FACILITATING MUSIC LEARNING WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
EXPOSITION
Critically Evaluating the Benefits of
Deliberate Online Social Spaces on
Students’ Learning
Samuel Soong Rui INTRODUCTION
Music Teacher As teachers, we constantly strive to create
a better learning environment for our
students so that they can achieve as much
as possible within the limited time frame.
When I first started teaching at Evergreen
Secondary School, I realised that the level of
ICT used by the average student was vastly
disproportionate to that of adult students, to
whom Google Docs and sharing drives were
commonplace as part of everyday work. I
decided to try implementing a substantial
amount of ICT tools to facilitate students’
learning, and because of that, they will be
more engaged in their learning of musical
content creation.
Evergreen
Secondary School
After experimenting with different tools, I
decided to create a website using wix.com
to pull together all the little ICT tools into a
one-stop web portal, designed to create a
private workspace for students to collaborate
and to store work online. However, while there
were students who enjoyed the lessons, it
was unclear as to whether the substantial use
of ICT tools played a major part. This was an
important discussion because creating and
maintaining the aforementioned workspaces
required a lot of effort and man hours. Google
Docs had to be created and linked to private
social spaces that were password protected,
social walls had to be policed, and this had to
be done for each of the 50-odd students from
three classes. The main question I had was, are
these beneficial enough to warrant the effort?
PURPOSE
This study seeks to investigate how beneficial
deliberate online social learning spaces (Google
Docs, social walls) are for a songwriting module
at Sec 1 level in terms of:
• Empowerment: sense of being better
musicians, feeling more confident in music
lessons, sense of being able to create their
own music and express themselves through
music
• Joy of learning: enjoying music in school,
finding tasks during music lessons
interesting
• Ownership of work: effort and time
students put in for their work
• Rigour of work: quality of work measured
against the benchmarks set from the
onset of the class, in terms of how well the
song was organised, whether or not the
number of syllables in each line was not
too dissimilar, and whether or not the meter
was strictly followed and chords equally
spaced out