Week 7 - Productivity and Professional Development

Being a traveling music teacher, technology has really aided in my productivity.  I have concert programs, worksheets, and music notation created and saved on my laptop.  Email keeps me informed of all the schedules and information for each school as well as communicating with parents.  I played an audio track for one of my orchestras today and next week I will show a YouTube clip of whale songs.  I use both Google Drive and Drop Box so I can work on my documents both on the school-issued laptop and on my personal laptop.  I can even use my husband’s Windows PC at his office, go “into the cloud”, and access my documents.

I find it curious that I have been reading a book about using technology.  In fact, that was the joke around the teacher’s room, reading a book to learn about applying technology.  Technology changes so fast that I thought a book would be up-to-date for only a short time.  While this may be true of a few parts of the book, “Music Learning Today” by William I. Bauer, it is a great resource for me.  I have been seeing the Google+ icon in various places, but I did not have the time to research it.  Here it is in chapter 8 (Bauer, 2014, pp. 178-179)!  Thank you, Dr. Bauer.

Also this week we were to explore Microsoft’s OneNote.  The Mac platform was just updated in March.  Reviews were so positive and enthusiastic; I was getting excited to start trying this app.  Unfortunately, the Mac version is very bare bones in comparison to the other platforms.  Because the Mac version is so new, there are no tutorials or reviews that I could find.  Even Microsoft training videos are only of the Windows platform.

This week, the juxtaposition of learning about technology, from a book or online was not what I was expecting, but I learned more than what was in the book or online.  Makes you think.