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2015: The Best Year for Student Learning!

Google is offering 200 people involved with education to their office in Boston for a day of training.  They have asked anyone interested to apply to attend this event by publishing how 2015 will be the best year for student learning!

For me, this is a year of clarity.  I've been teaching music for seven years and lately have seen a group of teachers in Massachusetts and surrounding states working on new common assessments for music.  I was interested in it at first and then the more I looked into it, found that assessment became the cornerstone of the music class and took over the curriculum, much like what it is doing in other subject areas which have high stakes testing.  I was looking to simplify the expectations, take out the randomness in the assignments I was giving, and provide clear definitions as to why I was teaching what I was teaching.  One day I was on Pinterest and saw the Recorder Karate curriculum...and thought, oh yeah, this works for 3rd and 4th graders why can't I apply that to high school band?  The idea with the karate belt system is that you will not earn the next colored belt until you have mastered all the challenges within a certain belt.  The key word here is "mastered."  Basically it is giving the kids the message that a B is not good enough...you must work hard to get an A if you are going to move up the ladder.  It also really gets it in their head that the curriculum is spiral....you can't really understand part B if you did not grasp part A as they are related.  I think in the past my curriculum could not actually live up to this standard.  The lessons were NOT related, students did not understand WHY they were learning what they were learning, and their musicianship as result did not get as high as their potential.

How does Google play a part in this?  My students will be creating a Google sites portfolio to place all of their recordings, screenshots, reflections for growth of learning and pictures of belts they have earned.  They will be able to see, hear, and live their enhanced musicianship.

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