The Score Magazine October 2019 | Page 28

VYOMA SHAH Technology in Music Education Education technology is entering an exciting space and the music education industry been quick to jump on the bandwagon. While there is still a lot left to explore and imbibe, below are some trends that can go a long way in revolutionizing classroom experiences: VR and AR Augmented and virtual reality can truly inject life into a potentially drab lesson. Google Expeditions, a free application on iOS and Google Play can be employed as a powerful teaching tool. It has a plethora of music related VR tours and AR possibilities. Remember how dreary history lessons can be? Well, through VR, students can learn about the history of jazz by walking around in New Orleans, no matter where in the world they might be. Through AR, students can learn about various medieval instruments, jazz instruments and the working mechanisms of different musical instruments. Another example is Teach U: VR, which offers students a creative platform to play piano and drums in VR. Using Google Cardboard, students can play virtual instruments and interact with others in the same virtual space . AI and Machine Learning Machine Learning is helping students practise more productively. Often, students practise away from their teacher’s supervision and hence might end up practising incorrectly. SmartMusic is one platform which provides students instant feedback as they practise . It signals students when they miss a beat or play a wrong note. Through this website, teachers can create customized classrooms, where they can generate sight reading exercises, import or create music using an in-built music notation tool and send personalized assignments to students. 26 The Score Magazine highonscore.com Magenta, a research project initially started by the Google research team has set out to prove that machine learning can be used to activate the dormant creative potential in everyone. For example, one aspect of it is the Magenta Studio, a plug in for Ableton Live, which lets students apply five tools, namely Continue, Groove, Generate, Drumify and Interpolate, to their MIDI files. Music production teachers could utilize this technology to stir up creativity amongst their students and help them explore the many different directions that their compositions could take. Blended Learning This combination of classroom learning and online learning has subsequently created the flipped classroom – where students watch pre-recorded instructional videos and go through handouts beforehand. Since students do a fair amount of independent study in this model of learning, teachers can really focus on developing their students’ critical thinking abilities and on practical application of theoretical concepts in the physical classroom. Kannu, a learning management system released by Kadenze, is making blended learning possible in music and arts education. Learning Analytics Learning Analytics, though still a relatively new paradigm in education, is gradually garnering the importance that it deserves. As a burgeoning number of students begin to engage with online learning applications, the expanse of digital traces they leave behind is prodigious. Collecting and analyzing this data can really help understand how students learn, how they engage with the content of the courses being delivered, the rate of their progress, reasons for underperformance, frequency of practise and many other such essential criteria. This information can help to develop and tailor curriculums and programs that ensure better results, thus building a culture of adaptive learning. There are numerous tools out there such as Yet Analytics, Wooclap, Knewton etc., that organizations can integrate in their long term education strategies. Technology has taken the education industry by storm. As educators, we can either sit and brood about how computers might someday supplant us humans or instead, put our minds to how we can better reap the benefits of this technological boom and deliver cutting-edge educational experiences – the choice is ours!