Looking back over my class blog Mrs Gower’s Classes, I realised that over the 4 years since I first started to use it, I managed to create a huge resource full of exemplar work, learning logs, a visual and aural summary of what happened in my classroom and much more! Below are a few tips for using a class blog in music-there are many others!
The best way to start is to decide what you want to use the blog for. I started because I wanted a simple, clear way to present student work that they could access from home and where I could include my comments and levels etc. as well so that thy could be presented at work scrutiny and lesson observations as required. The school VLE just didn’t look as professional and wasn’t easy for students to navigate through, plus I could be a bit creative very easily.
I then realised that I this could be a way for the students to complete tasks that they could undertake independently (listening to different music, feeding back on each others’ work, letting me know how they feel they are doing, feeding back on progress etc) outside the classroom leaving my lesson time for things they really do need my support with (instrumental skills, playing together, music ICT etc). In an hour a week it’s hard to fit it all in, so taking some of it online has made my lessons more musical and I hope more effective.
Some ideas that I tried and liked:
- Online voting for house music (look at the number of votes on each and the comments at the bottom!)
- Listening to a relevant range of music and posting comments about their responses to it (I always found it hard to get them focussed to do this as a class, yet at home they were very happy to listen to all kinds of things and I learned loads about what they engage with and how I can broaden their tastes!!)
- Links to google forms where students can feed back and evaluate their work which copies straight to a spreadsheet Also useful for gathering info from primary schools
Anna Gower 