Bob's Wiki Page

Assignment week 8: Web page with html.

Assignment week 7:

Pod casts: I was aware if twi dufferebt poidcasts for musicians but did a search and found many more. Here are three of the new ones I found that would be useful.

1. Vic Firth is a manufacturer of drum sticks and drum equipment. Many well known percussionists use their equipment. At their web site they have an artist series of video podcasts with clinics offerred by the artists. They include instructional podcasts on drumset, marching drums, and concert percussion. They include artists like Gary Burton, Steve Gad, and Dave Weckle to name a few. They are extremely useful for learning technique as well as equipment repair and tuning. They vary a great deal as to length, but run from about 2 or 3 minutes to 20 or more. You can also subscribe to recieve their weekly pick automatically.

2. Music tech for ME (music educators) is a monthly podcast discussing topics about technology specific to music education. They are audio only. The most recent episode discusses various music notation software and uses. An earlier one interviews Carol Johnson, the creator of the"Virtual School of Music." They are about 30 minutes long. You can subscribe to recieve them automatically on itunes or download individual episodes.

3. Saxtips is a podcast for saxophone players. It is a video cast and produced by a saxophonist. It includes some performance videos of sax players, some clinics on specific songs or techniques, and some interviews of players. There are a couple very interesting podcasts that include relatively unusual instruments (the baritone and bass saxophone) for students who have never seen these, and the other alto sax performance podcasts are great examples of good playing sound and technique for students to emulate.

Assignment week 6:

Blogs: After a brief search, I was led to the following site called a music education blog collective, which is sort of a blog on music blogs. The right side bar on the site contains some information on the authors of this site and some other general information and then list a pile of blogs on music. some are specific to education and some are about new music, performers, composers, technology, and lots of other stuff. I chose three blogs to link and comment on they are below:

1. The MENC band forum: The letters stand for Music Educators' National Conference. The topics are more or less random but very specific to running a band program with lots of good suggestions by people who are actually doing it. They also have MENC orchestra and choral forums.

2. The Dailydale: This site has a huge variety of topics but mostly on music in general and the music industry and current events. There was a very interesting discussion about the recent judgement against a woman who downloaded music illegally and a school who pulled a song from a concert because of a controversy over lyrics: "jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton."

3. JSavage: This is a personal blog for a man who is a teacher and guest lecturer at several universities in the UK. There were some topics that I enjoyed including one discussion on the process of acquiring a PHD and how it varied from university to university, and another that dealt with technology in music education.

Assignment week 5:

Five good webquests within my curriculum. Although my main emphasis is always on playing rather than researching the instruments, these sites do offer some options for enrichment for more advanced students and alternate assigments that can be done during lesson times when a student has forgotten his instrument or cannot play for some reason (I have had students incapable of playing for short times because of new braces, broken fingers and arms, or illness.)

1. The Chamber Music Challenge: All small group music is considered chamber music and these ensembles offer challenges different from large band playing. This task is a tough one for my age group but do-able for a good 6th grader. It would need to be done on my computer during lesson time rather than assigned for homework because the student needs music writing software.

2. The Quest for a New World Instrument: A great introduction or follow up discussion of world music and environmental music. It challenges the students to listen to unusual sources of music and be creative (always a good thing in music.)

3. Musical Era Webquest: This helps to put music in an historic context and in order chronologically. This is always difficult for students to envision and very helpful for them in performance when they do.

4. Composers in Time: Also a chronological aproach to composers, but uses more specific information and is geared better for younger players. A very good suppliment especially after we have performed pieces that were written by these composers.

5. Papa Haydn's Playhouse: A great introductin to this composer. On page 18 of our lesson books there is a song by Haydn. This website lets a student discover the background on him. I would use this one after the student learns that song and to expand his knowledge of the original piece that our book selection is taken from.

Assignment week 4:

Promotion Photo for band recruitment made on fireworks:

Original image from google images, I used the feather feature, the blur tool, the burn tool and Text.

I tried some other options but discarded them.

Assigment for week three: Del.icio.us

Here is a link to my newly created del.icio.us page. This is an interesting site especially if you are constatnly using different computers and want your bookmarks saved. I could not load the buttons (I'm not sure why). I suspect it had to do with using netscape on Mac rather than a bill gates monopoly product.

Assignment for week two: Search Engines.

I have a software program called band in a box the creates accompaniments for songs. Although you can make songs for the library in the program, it comes with some already in there. I decided to search for new songs to add to the library. I thought there might be downloadable songs available or CD's of songs for purchase. I later found out that I had used a poor choice of words -- I should have asked for "songs" not "library" but for the sake of the assigment, I continued with the original choice.

1. I entered the words: band in a box library

2. For Google there were 2,120,00 hits. For Ask 179,200,000. For Yahoo 13,100,000.

3. Of the first 10 in Google 9 applied directly to my subject. With Ask 6. and with Yahoo 6.

4. Some of the Links: Google -- to purchase the software go here. For more information on it go here. For the site of the company that makes band in a box go here.

Ask -- The home page for band in a box is here. To buy the software at an academic discount go here. Another popular musician's page that sells the program is here.

Yahoo -- many of the same sites came up but to download the software rather than buy on cd go here.

5. For all three engines, I used exact phrase to narrow the search. This is where I learned that library was a poor choice of words.

6. After using the advanced search Google was narrowed to 2 sites, Ask 1, and Yahoo got no hits for the exact phrase "band in a box library".

7. I thought Google was very clean and simple to use. I like the idea of the "I'm feeling Lucky" button that gets you the no. 1 site. I don't know how often I'd use it, but it's cool.

Ask also has a clean, easy to use front page and better graphics than google.

Yahoo is way too cluttered. It might be OK if it was your home page, but I prefer other sites for news, weather, sports, etc... when I want a search engine that's all I want.

8. There were no really significant differences in the first 10 search results for these three engines. That may change depending on the search. I will have to continue to try all three for other searches. There was quite a difference in the original number of hits, but I don't know how important that would be until you got down to the ten millionth hit.

9. For me it is a toss up between Ask and Google as to which I prefer. Right now out of habit I almost always use Google but have decided to try some others. I do occaisionally use Mama.com -- it combines the top hits with several search engines.

A good, useful assignment.