Collaboration Canvas

The canvas that I chose to remix was about the changing ideologies of race, culture, and demographics. For my content area, I added a specific element of culture, music-making, to this topic. I thought that this would be a good way to bridge these two different content areas by taking the broader topic of race and culture and choosing one aspect of that to focus on. The original canvas included some additional links about issues of discrimination, which I would explore through musical stereotypes and the political aspects of certain music. In the image gallery of the original canvas, there were several images of people from different cultures. When creating my image gallery, I used pictures of people from different cultures as well, but ones that included their instruments. The original canvas also focused on demographics, and I thought that a good way to explore this through music would be to talk about how the demographics of where you live and the cultures you are exposed to affect your musical choices and awareness. One of the images in my gallery shows the musical preferences of different demographics, which I thought would be an interesting study that combined elements of both units. Overall, my goal with this remixed canvas was to use my content area of music as a way to explore a more specific aspect of culture, race, and demographics, and to use the topic of race and culture to explore different music of the world and how it affects culture.

Link to canvas:
http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2651&mode=view#network6

Teoria

As a teacher, there are many ways in which we can encourage students to expand their musical knowledge outside of the classroom. Particularly if you find yourself in a large classroom setting, or with a limited amount of time and/or resources, technology on the web is a great direction to point students in for extra help. I know that as a student myself I have sometimes utilized such resources in order to better understand something I was learning in class. 

One such resource is teoria.com, which is a music theory website. On this site, you can read about different tutorials to help explain music theory, as well as find exercises to help practice music theory and ear training skills. These exercises are one of the most helpful resources on this site, because they facilitate what often happens in class. However, what happens in class may leave many students feeling left behind or as though they still need more practice. By using the web exercises, students can move at their own pace and repeat something as many times as they need to.

For example, when I was first working on rhythmic dictation, I found it hard to do in class and would lose my place in the dictation and end up not being able to write down anything. Because the teacher didn’t have time to help everyone individually, she often didn’t check our work and just moved on to the next topic, not realizing that many of us weren’t able to do the exercise. So in order to help ourselves improve, my friend and I would sit down outside of class and practice doing the exercises on Teoria that were similar to the ones we did in class, and it helped us enormously. There are some skills that really do just require repetition and practice, and unfortunately class times and sizes do not always allow for this. Making students aware of outside resources like Teoria can be a great help for them to practice what was done in class and improve at their own pace.

Unit Plan Canvas

My unit plan is about barriers in communication, specifically explored through the arts. What I wanted to do was make connections between a similar theme in music, film, and literature. These arts are all connected - for instance, the lyrics in a song can be compared with the words of a poem and the dialogue of a film, or album artwork can be compared with the visual images of film - there are many possibilities. 
In creating my canvas, I wanted to show how the Pink Floyd's song "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" was connected visually to their film "The Wall." I did this by including images from their album cover and film cover, as well as the music video for their song. I made two galleries, one for Pink Floyd and one for Robert Frost and "Mending Wall," because I wanted there to be some visual representations for both subjects. 
For additional reading, I included a link to an in-depth analysis of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the full text of Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” and some writings on “Mending Wall.” I also included the link to Pink Floyd’s film “The Wall” on IMDb.com because I thought it would be useful for students to read about the film in the same way they would for any other movie they were interested in. I included a link to The Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” because this is an additional song that I would explore later on in the unit as a picture of isolation.


Link to canvas:
http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2221&mode=view#network6