Noteflight in the Classroom II
I’ve been on a couple of field trips that were very memorable indeed — one recent, one not so recent. I’ve been remiss in writing these up and it’s about time I did so!
Last week I visited Kevin Coyne’s classroom at McDevitt Middle School in Waltham, MA. Waltham is one of the original New England mill towns on the banks of the Charles River, and has taken some hard knocks over the long years of industrial decline; yet it has a lot of great culture going on and its downtown has really perked back up in the last decade. The McDevitt school reflects this mix in its own architecture: it’s a fairly new, modern structure grafted directly onto one of those “old-school” schools: an intimidating, stolid brickwork bastion. Somehow the combination is pleasing and chimerical, neither old-school nor new-school.
Kevin’s class was great, and incredibly inspiring for me to visit. He had created a composition activity based on Noteflight in which his students write pieces with some simple constraints — in this case, an 8-bar A section, 8-bar B section, and a repeat of the A, all in the range of a G clef staff. Students worked individually some of the time at their computers, and came together at other times for sharing/critique of their works-in-progress on a digital projector, directed by Kevin. The mood was very upbeat: I could see the kids were having a lot of fun. For them, music notation had left the realm of the abstract: they were creating something of their own. As Kevin said to me, “In art class kids make drawings — why can’t they write music in music class?”
One thing that jumped out at me was that the kids weren’t only working individually: because all their pieces were online together, they were constantly sharing their work with each other, on an informal level that fed into the general mood of creative excitement. They were constantly chatting, and went back to their class home page on Noteflight to check out each other’s work from time to time (since Kevin had set things up so everyone could see everyone else’s pieces). Their pieces had funny and fanciful names, with some teenage middle-school braggadocio mixed in sometimes. This was music composition returned to a place it truly inhabits: music in the realm of play, rather than as a collection of theoretical rudiments.
Another thing I noticed was the ease that the online medium brought to the class-wide activities around sharing and critiques. It was very easy for Kevin to survey the set of pieces being built in his class and to bring them up on the projector at will. I was really impressed by his skill in managing the class discussion dialogue, keeping everyone’s tone positive while still asking his students to comment critically. At one point he had a student’s piece up on the screen and asked the student if he liked the change that someone had suggested. The answer was a good-natured “no”, and the student had an alternative that he had already been working on at the same time, on his own computer.
Going back in October, now… I visited Lowell, Massachusetts to visit a Lowell HS classroom in which Prof. Alex Ruthmann’s music ed. students were working. Like Waltham, Lowell is another former industrial mill town with a struggling economy and the urban problems that go with that. And, like Waltham, it’s also a place where innovation is going on. Alex teaches music education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell Music Dept. where his students are experiencing some of the latest ideas in music learning and technology.
In the class I saw, high school piano students were paired off, while they worked on creating collaborative co-authored pieces in Noteflight which they presented to the class at the project’s conclusion. They received little or no instruction in the use of the software, and didn’t seem to need it: they just jumped in and started writing, learning as they wrote. Noteflight was well suited to this idea because the pairs of students did not always work on their piece at the same time, or on the same part of it. Having these pieces online meant either member of the pair could contribute no matter what computer they were working on, or whether they were in class or at home. The students covered an enormous range in terms of their comfort level with music — or even with the idea of composing it — but Alex and his students were really adept at creating a space where the kids could themselves create. Some pairs wrote original songs, others used a familiar tune as a starting point, but everyone made something.
We’re looking forward to getting some links to some of these classroom creations to post here!