Calendar In The Classroom

I am envisioning using google calendar coordinated with classroom to announce assignments and keep students up to date on their band lesson times.  If I create a band lesson calendar, I could share it with classroom teachers and students.  I can use the schedule appointments option on google calendar for students to choose their own band lesson groups and pick a time,  this would be great because they can schedule their own time, and it will copy the event into their own personal calendars.  Having the event of their band lesson being on their own personal calendar allows them to set reminders and popups.  I could also share the calendar that is created with teachers so that they could see the students' times.

Another use of the calendar would be to attach playing assignments to google calendar events.  This would actually work very well with the standards based grading model that I incorporated last year.  I could have playing tests scheduled for a specific day/time and attach the description of what students would need to be able to perform.  As always, if students are ahead they could test out of that skill early.  

Blog #1 - Personalized Learning

Personalized learning is a collection of strategies that allow teachers to move away from a standardized educational model. The model that most interests me is Project Based Learning (PBL), I think that this strategy would help with some motivation and interest problems that I have in my 6th grade general music class. One of my power standards is to have students listen to and analyze music using the elements of music and their descriptors.

Using PBL, I students could begin with the driving question of "Why do I like this song?", then create scaffolding so that students can really dive into a certain genre and even a specific song, and use the elements of music to describe what they like about that song, using musically specific terms focusing on a musically vocabulary that will allow them to speak intelligently about music.  

Scaffolded projects could include vocabulary work, listening examples with example responses, quizzes, or essays etc. I think that this type of project would be a combination of the PBL model and the Blended Model.