Skip to main content

JamSkolan Day 1


Today was our first day of the JamSkolan and was focused on getting to know each other and talk about our initial experiences with the software program Jam2Jam.  Each delegation then spent time preparing a ten-minute PowerPoint to be presented to the full group the next day.  Dr. Alex Ruthmann from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and myself spent time looking at old and new video bits of the Pentucket Regional High School students who tested out the software. 

That night the group of music teachers and post graduate students had dinner with Nathan Rye, the director of music at Nyanda State High School in Brisbane, Australia.  We learned much about the music education system in the state of Queensland.  Also, he noted that he wanted to start a drumline next year so I hope to share some expertise with him to help him out with such an endeavor.  


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Clarinet 101: Simple Steps to Improve Your Clarinet Section by Dr. Gail Lehto Zugger

While at the conference, I attended a clinic focussing strictly on the clarinet.  I learned some pretty cool tricks to help young clarinetists sound great.  I learned that elementary and middle school clarinet players tend to lean their right elbow on their thighs which is not good.  Additionally, they usually have their chins pointed down which cuts off the amount of air they can get through the instrument.  The clinician gave a great idea for explaining just how much breath is needed for good air support in clarinet playing.  She told us to tell the students that they need to pretend they are 100 years old and that they need to be able to take a deep enough breath to blow out 100 candles.   A question I asked was how to handle clarinet playing with students who have braces.  When playing a clarinet, the lower lip should curl in over the lower teeth, but if you have braces in the way, what do you do?  The clinician was stumped! Someone in the audience told us all her method, which was

Vocaroo.com Online Voice Recorder

www.vocaroo.com I discovered Vocaroo.com last year through Dr. Alex Ruthmann.  Vocaroo is an online voice recorder which gives you a link to the recording along with the ability to download in multiple forms.  It was not working on my school server when I tried it a few months.  I checked it out again yesterday as I was trying to find an alternative to Google Voice for another teacher who wanted a recording to last over three minutes.  I was pleasantly surprised that is fully functional and now even lets you upload recordings.  Sure you can do this on SoundCloud but you need to log into that.  As a teacher, I find that 20% of my time spent utilizing technology is filling out usernames and passwords.  Luckily, some cloud-based software are now letting you sign in with your Google account.  Vocaroo requires no username or password so it is a winner in my book.  You can even receive an embed code for your website.   One negative is that your file will be gone forever if the internet