My Experience at the 2015 I.M.P.A.C.T. Conference

For three days I attended the New York University Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology (IMPACT) Conference.

1. It was IMPORTANT to meet teachers who are just like me (I’m not alone): Over the course of three days I met four teachers who I would also consider future collaborators.  We are all doing similar things which are not typically done in our home states.  We are fighting “the system,” which is what I call old-school music education.  The truth is that 20% of students take band, orchestra, and choir.  The other 80% must have a MEANINGFUL music education.  At one point we discussed why we were teaching music. There was large discussion about cultivating talent vs. teaching music for the joy of music making.  Barbara Freedman summed it up by saying “Teaching music saves lives.”  
   
   
2. Industry Meets Music Education: This is the first conference I have been to which combined teachers, future teachers, and industry leaders in an interactive way. In order for the technology to bridge into real classrooms, there needs to be more of this happening.  Industry needs to hear ideas and feedback from teachers.  If they do not they face the wrath of teachers not wanting to take the time and energy to learn/implement the technology into their classrooms.  At a time with new educator evaluations, transition to common core curriculum/assessments, and new state-mandates left and right, the time a teacher has to engage in new technology and thinking is nil.  Simply worded, new technology for teachers and students needs to be user-friendly and bug-free or teachers won’t use them.

3. Creating Music Addicts: This was a term New York music teacher Eric Dalio and I came up with in the spare of the moment conversation after Barbara Freedman’s composition session.  We talked about Barbara saying she teaches music to save lives.  Eric brought up the point as well that we want kids to continue making music after grade 12.  In essence, we want to save lives and have everyone continue making music throughout life...hence the term-music addicts. If you are going to have an addiction, let’s make it music.  This might be what gets the student onto the bus, feel self-worth, and have motivation through personal meaning.  I think we need to remind ourselves of these goals every once in a while.  It really brings why we do what we do home.  
   
   How do we create music addicts?  The curriculum and ideas shared in each session I attended provided those answers:

• John Churchville discussed how his students compose music:personal meaning
• Tom Malone shared a hip and relative DJ curriculum
• Stephania Druga discussed traveling the world to share music making and coding with arduino boards.
• Kate Stone is re-writing (literally)  how we think of making any object into a musical instrument
• Jon Stapleton, a very articulate college student, has developed musical tangibles to introduce in elementary schools
• Jim Frankel showed us the latest version of Practice First which in my view will replace Smart Music

4.  Meeting Barbara Freedman: For those who don’t know, Barabra Freedman is the epitome of pedagogues for K-12 education.  She speaks my language.  She writes books with lesson plans which you can personalize.  In my area (Massachusetts), it seems that music technology is being added to many high schools as an elective class.  There is not a lot of curriculum out there and many teachers have ended up developing their own.  As I’ve stated before, the window of time a teacher has in life nowadays to do things like coming up with awesome lesson plans, is getting littler and littler as we speak.  We need resources like Barbara to share curriculum we know will work and give our students an amazing music creation experience.  Hearing her speak got me more excited to teach music and literally agreed with everything she was saying. I do not understand why NAfME doesn't just hire her to write lesson plans copyright free. I was very concerned last week to see their new composition rubrics and yet when you go to their lesson plan page of their website and click "composition," no lessons appear. There are some deep into the website but they are hard to find.

5.  Soundtrap: A new technology which is going to change everything.  In short, it is an online collaborative recording studio with video conferencing. This video explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xheoUkbyhE4  The capabilities for the music classroom are humongous.  Additionally, it will encourage students to make music outside of the school day.  Honestly, I need time to wrestle with this program and think how I am going to begin to implement it.  I have too many ideas right now!  

6.  Discussions About Composition: While at the conference I got to speak with Matt McClean of the Young Composers and Improvisers Network.  He has developed an online curriculum for composition, teamed with Noteflight for notation software, and has had professional musicians provide feedback and perform the pieces created by students in New York and beyond.  As I have now switched gears to adding composition as part of our Pentucket concert band curriculum, I am looking to incorporate this curriculum which has clearly worked for his students.  From what I am experiencing, students have a much deeper connection with music when they get to compose and hear it.  This is different then learning how to be an expert performer which is the current model of secondary level music education. We have a real issue with composition in the United States right now.  Firstly, many teachers simply do not have it in their curriculum.  Secondly, we are always trying to make it into a contest..winners and losers.  Composing should instead be considered a part of the fabric of everyone's’ lives.  Lastly, we need a rock star curriculum which finally has arrived through various pedagogues and people like Matt and Barbara Freedman. The Vermont Midi Project has some fantastic templates/lessons on Noteflight as well (click here).

During my session I was able to show some of our composition projects at Pentucket featuring student-created compositions which were aligned to short animations.  Another teacher shared a great idea to have students compose music to NASA videos. This is the start to something special and I think new ideas will occur through new collaborations. We are going to start a new composition club at Pentucket so those who want to can explore this realm after school with an advisor.

It was great to speak with Robinson McClellan from Noteflight. He is an educator and composer himself and like Barbara, speaks my language. I think Noteflight has really changed the course for music creation which I have seen my own students truly benefit from.

7.  The Power Is In The Conversation:  Each day we had a one-hour roundtable discussion focused on a certain aspect of music and media.  There were industry, higher ed, and K-12 educators taking part and everyone had unique backgrounds and equally unique ideas to share.  I think in general, we need a middle-man to organize the communication between industry and music education.  In my eyes, this is Alex Ruthmann.  Myself and a few teachers were asking for this mentoring when he was teaching in Massachusetts and he created monthly music educator meetups (with food)!.  I hear he is doing something similar in New York.  He is “in the know” of everything music technology.  As he is a music educator himself, he is able to express how the technology can be used in the classroom.  Basically, we need more people like Alex Ruthmann to help disseminate music technology into America’s schools.  

Where do we go from here?  I want to use my takeaways from the conference and try them in my classes at Pentucket. I also want to share what I learned with others.  It would be great to stay connected with the attendees of the conference.  This was a truly unique experience and can’t wait for I.M.P.A.C.T. 2016.