Season One: Episode Twenty-One
Google Sites
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE SHOW
The Google platform is a fantastic tool to use in the music classroom. I'm always looking for ways to incorporate technology into my classroom without taking away from music learning, creating, singing, playing, and moving. There is a place for technology in the classroom and I want to share how I use Google Sites with my students to teach the orchestra.
Each year I teach a unit on the Instruments of the Orchestra to my eighth graders. I've always begun the unit in the classes immediately following their Music Sharing that happens in late-January/early-February. It's a great way to shift to something completely different that then leads us into more musical learning and evaluating of pieces later on in the year. Every year I've presented the information in different ways and always felt like a partner project would help them learn more and give them more freedom to learn the information in a new way. So this year I decided to have students work with a partner to create a Google Site about the orchestra.
Google Sites is a platform that allows anyone to create a simplistic website and allows people to collaborate together at the same time. I love this because every student can be working at the same time on different elements within the presentation. You can link a wide variety of media onto the site including any google materials such as forms, sheets, docs, slides. You can add YouTube videos, students can link online images, and there are a whole bunch of ideas out there for what you can do with the Google Sites platform. And there are a variety of templates to use. You can add multiple pages to the Site. It's easy to use. Students understand it quickly and bonus - it's totally free.
Before you begin asking students to use this tool, it's always best to play around with it yourself. You also want to make sure you know what content you are wanting your students to create before beginning a project and doing it yourself so you can test out how it is done. And you'll know any hiccups that they may encounter along the way.
I knew that I wanted my students to create a Site about the instruments in the orchestra. I knew that I wanted them to have a main page with an overview of what the orchestra is and four pages dedicated to each individual family - the strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. I wanted students to go beyond simply inserting pictures of instruments and then writing short snippets about each instrument. Though there was some of that, but I wanted them to do it in a more interesting and creative way. I wanted them to have some creative outlets for how they could share the information.
In looking for how other educators have used Google Sites, I came across the idea of a bingo page where each square asks students to present information about the given topic. The bingo page I found was not aimed at the orchestra, but I modified it to fit what I was wanting students to demonstrate within their learning. There are many ways for students to display their learning and so providing choice is a great idea. After all, we're going for understanding of content and how fun for students to have options for how they want to show that content.
My bingo grid is 5x4 with five squares going across the top and four squares going down, equaling 20 squares total, which means there are twenty options. Choices inside of the squares included students creating a video of themselves sharing information about a specific instrument. They could create a fake Facebook page as orchestral composer and in that, their fake friends would be people who had known the composer or had been involved in their life. The posts would refer to pieces composed or the personal life of that composer. You could also pretend to have students be an artist and update about styles of music within either the orchestra or different genres that were performed. Or some of my students were really creative and pretended to be a specific instrument in the orchestra. For example, Mr. Tim P. Ani was timpani and he had the friends 'Snare Drum,' 'Bass Drum,' and other instruments within his section and then the posts were all about the types of things that they were creating. And it was just a fun way for them to demonstrate what the instruments sounded like, but also give them a little bit of fun to be creative with it. And they really enjoyed that.
Another idea was that they could create memes about instruments, incorporating facts within the memes. They could create a Google Form quiz about a family of instruments, write a poem, create a short comic strip, record a podcast, tell a story about an orchestral piece, and so on. And then in the bottom square, the bottom square in the right hand corner, students were offered the opportunity to create their own idea to get it approved by me. Some of the students mentioned creating a type of online game like a Jeopardy game and they could create that with the questions within the Jeopardy game. I can't think of what the other ones were, but they had some really great ideas for that one.
I asked my students to choose three squares for each page that they would create. However, they could not repeat any of the squares so this would mean that they would use a total of twelve squares from the twenty square bingo grid and show their learning a multitude of ways. In addition to using three ideas from the bingo grid, they had to also write a short description of each instrument in each family, except the percussion family because there are so many percussion instruments. I simply asked them to choose five-six instruments to provide information.
So here's a little bit about the process and how I went about with this project. Having never taught the information in this way before, I honestly wasn't sure as to how long it would take students to complete each step and produce a final product that was thorough and well-organized. Initially I had planned it to take four class periods which is roughly about four and a half hours since I see them for seventy minute periods, but it took six class periods. So the class periods broke down into the following order:
First Class: Overview of the project, basics of how to add pages, insert pages, expectations, and then beginning the main page that day. I was really fortunate to have one of our technology facilitators present information during the first class about Google Slides. Mary Torres gives students information about how to set up the Google Site, how to share it with their partner and myself, how to add the pages, information, and so on. It was very helpful.
Second Class: Main page.
Third Class: First page - information about one family of their choosing and reviewing/editing main page
Fourth Class: Second page and finishing first page
Fifth Class: Third page
Sixth Class: Fourth Page
Seventh Class: The students gave presentations to their class and I asked them for student feedback along the way. In this seventh class, while students presented their Google Sites to the class, the class could ask questions about what the students had learned and how they created their site, as well as why they chose to demonstrate why they chose those three elements from the bingo chart for their project. Each student had the same rubric that I was using to grade while they were watching their peers present the information and then they could fill out information about the presentations as we went. Their insights were very helpful and they often mentioned things that I had overlooked. And while they were not grading their peers, the insights were definitely invaluable
I'll definitely review how I want the presentation portion to look next year because I felt that it was a lot of regurgitation of the same information from each group and students were really sure what more to say about their sites. They shared information about the instruments and showed what they had created, but its as a lot of, "and here's the violin and we've already heard that the violin has, you know, whatever the information was..." or "here's my strings page and I used three aspects about the bingo sheet" or you know, "this is the video we put on the Sites - the String Quartet by Haydn," and then they would play a portion of it.
But being that it was all the same information shared, despite creating it in different ways within their Sites, I will definitely restructure the presentations so that students don't feel like they're all saying the same things over and over. Something I might consider is asking a class from a younger grade to come down and have students set up small presentations in areas around the room so that my eighth graders could tell younger students from another grade level about the instruments, what they had learned, and maybe have listening stations as well. I think they'd enjoy sharing with other students rather than simply sharing the same information repeatedly with each other. This is an area I felt was the weakest part of the project for me because I need to reevaluate how this should look, sound, and feel better and give students a better understanding of what to share when presenting their material.
Throughout the process, I monitored the progress of each pair of students as they worked. There were students who were laser-focused, well-organized, who finished early and there were students who were struggling with time management throughout each period who had difficulty finishing. You'll see a variation in your classroom as well. While students worked, I would sit near a group that was less organized or focused and ask them questions along the way to guide them. Being that I was working with older students, it was important to be available for questions, but not hovering over them and telling them step-by-step. It's definitely a fine line of expecting them to work independently and also guiding when you can see that they aren't progressing or they're distracted or they're just simply not pushing themselves to get completed.
My advice on this end is to hold them accountable and be clear on expectations and hold them to it. I talked to students as we went along, updated them as to what I was seeing, and what could be done if they were feeling stuck. It's vital that you are moving from group to group throughout the class, looking for work before class, and then providing feedback. One of my favorite things about Google Sites is the ability to leave comments on the Sites for students. This was a great way to identify spelling mistakes they may have overlooked or that weren't caught, make short comments about what was still missing, and provide positive feedback about the work that had been done. It's helpful to leave the feedback between class periods and ask students to look at the comments and make corrections as recommended at the start of the class. This saves you time and you're available for other needs during class time as a result of them working on newer portions of the project.
If you're interested in trying this project with your students or creating something like it for a different concept, here are a few modifications and ideas that could make this project work for you. And I share these because you may not have 70-minute class periods and you may be working with fourth or fifth grade students who at that level are going to be writing a little more simplistically than eighth graders and for the most part. And you may be only using forty-five minute time periods and so, to modify this is still absolutely do-able and can work in your classroom. So let's talk about four different ways you could modify this project:
1) If you wanted to keep the same criteria I used where you want all of the groups to create a google site about the entire orchestra but you teach for shorter class periods, you might consider asking students to choose only one or maybe two elements from the grid rather than three. Or make it even more simplistic than that and keep it very basic with them finding pictures of the instruments, linking a video of that instrument playing, and then giving a couple of facts about each instrument.
2) The second option might be to allow groups of three or four students to work together instead of pairs. For this, each student could be in charge of one of the families of instruments and work together on the main page. It would definitely allow for work to go quicker.
3) For the third one, maybe you focus only on one family of instruments rather than the entire orchestra. This could be a project that you do where within a class, you assign each group a family of instruments so that a group of students works on the strings family and their Google Site is about that family and then another one does the brass family and so on. They design a google site for that family and then each classes' page is shared with the other students in classes - either with a presentation style or you could simply have them share the document with other students to view it.
4) And then another option would be to assign one instrument per student - individually created Google Sites that a single student works on themselves. The students are each asked to learn about one instrument from one of the families of the orchestra and maybe give them options. You might have them consider creating an outline that looks like this:
Three pages:
Main page being a picture of the instrument, a few sentences about it, and a video
First page would have information about the structure of the instrument, how long it is, how it was built, how it has changed over the years, and maybe even how it is played and held
Second page could be any additional information like fun facts or famous pieces that feature the instrument or something that relates to them...maybe they have a family member that plays the viola! Sharing something shorter.
Maybe this project sounds like a great idea, but the concept of instruments isn't one that you do a unit with your older students and you do that with younger. And so if you were wanting something for different ages, there are different concepts that would make great Google Sites projects so I'm also going to share four concepts that you might use Google Sites for:
1) Peter and the Wolf
Love this. Love Prokofiev. So the main page could be a short synopsis of the story and then have a page about each character and their corresponding instruments. That would be a great one to work in a large group.
2) Musical Forms
Maybe the main page gives the definitions of the musical forms and you could have one page about each form whether it's a rondo, AB form, ABA form, theme and variation
3) The Nutcracker
Similar to Peter and the Wolf where students could share their favorite part of the ballet, describe what ballet is, and then possibly pull out music pieces that they have learned and listened to and share about what is happening in the music or linking to other videos online for comparison standpoints. I love the idea of Google Sites projects working with books because children love stories and for them to be able to retell a story is a great way to integrate language arts as well into your lesson!
4)Music Notes, Staff, and Concepts
And a fourth idea for creating a Google Site with students is a little more lengthy, but could be developed over time. And I don't really have this one as fleshed out as the others. I feel like those are more tangible, but stick with me and see what you think. So the idea would be that this progresses over time and the students build on it throughout the year as they learn new music notes and about the music staff. So whether you are creating it for them or I guess they could be creating it along the way, the first page could be about the music staff and pictures of music notes. Maybe how to speak them, how long the beats are, and kind of basic information about the structures of the music notes and basics about the music staff. And then on following pages, students could share information that they know about, say, the quarter note. And from the quarter note, they could share a song that they learned with the quarter note in it and they could record themselves speaking or singing the song or the chant that they have learned in class. And then maybe the next page is the eighth note pairs and then the next page would be the quarter rest. And on each page students could explain what it is, post songs that they have learned about it, and identify the different music symbols, I'll say, along the way.
And so over time that could be built and it kind of be like a personal site that helps them build their musical vocabulary. So just a thought for that one.
Google Sites is simply another tool that can be used for students to show learning in a different way. We are always encouraged to use technology in our classrooms and I love using technology when it can add more value to engagement and student learning about musical concepts without taking away from the music making! For any topic where students would be sitting and listening to me talk for a long period of time, those are the topics where student engagement could be increased by allowing them to do something with the information to create something. A great example - the orchestra. I could share pictures of each instrument and info, but yawn...so incredibly boring if I'm just standing in front of them showing them pictures, having them listen to it and them just going, 'okay and next.' I don't believe that's going to stick with them and yes, I have been guilty of doing that when I first started teaching so it, it's just... They could do so much more if it's more hands-on and it's not just simply, 'here's a picture, this is what it looks like, and this is how it sounds.' There's nothing applicable so take it further. And those are the types of things where I believe students could be encouraged to create and to use technology and it wouldn't take away from the music making because it's simply information that they can take for listening and possibly for even for creating later on. It's much more interesting and engaging.
Consider the topics you share with your students that require them to sit and listen and then think about if these are that you might want to look into modifying and adding technology or changing up in another way. Because I truly believe as music educators that our role is to help students make music and by making music, my opinion, I believe they should be singing. They should be playing. They should be moving. They should be creating. And that they should physically be doing something that makes a musical outcome. And if technology is simply only used so that we can check a box and say that we are using technology and we're just using it, but it's not very purposeful, then take the technology away and go back to basic music making where your students are singing, playing instruments, and moving.
Technology should be an asset and it should be a tool, but it should not rule our classrooms. The music making should come out of the students and the technology should be used to help enhance what would have been if students were sitting and simply listening. So - anyway. Get off my soapbox.
So the final thing is student feedback. After we complete a project like this, I always ask for student feedback. I'm able to really find out what students learned, what they found to be valuable, and ideas for how to make the project better. Sure, you might receive a few responses where there's not as much information given back or where the students say, 'No, it was good' or 'I enjoyed the project,' 'There isn't anything I like,' but honestly the vast majority of the time, students really do want to share their thoughts and they have a lot to say, especially if they know that you are asking out of sincerity because you really want them to get as much out of this project and out of the Google Site and their learning and that they can share their insights without being judged and with an open-minded teacher who really wants to make it better for the next group coming.
So I asked students for feedback and I recorded their responses with permission. And I think it's really great to be able to hear from the students themselves as to what they thought of the project. So I'm going to have you listen to a couple of their responses and they were asked what they enjoyed about creating the Google Site project because this was the first time that they had ever created a Google Site project in any of their classes. I asked them what they didn't enjoy or what was challenging, what they learned overall, and what they would change about the project. So here is what my students said:
If you're interested in seeing the bingo sheet that I created and the outline, as well as a few examples of student work and what they created using Google Sites, I'll have all of that linked on the blog at afternoonti.blogspot.com. (See below under Links to Materials)
Google Sites is an amazing platform and such a great way for students to show their learning. I highly encourage you to try it out and would love to hear what ideas you have and what you've used in your classroom. Particularly with Google Sites.
How to create a Google Site
Online Tools for Project
Cover Page for Packet
Google Bingo Page
Rubric
**For student examples, some materials may be blocked and not displayed on the pages, but you'll get an idea of what students' work looked like.
Student Example Site #1
Student Example Site #2
Google Sites
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE SHOW
The Google platform is a fantastic tool to use in the music classroom. I'm always looking for ways to incorporate technology into my classroom without taking away from music learning, creating, singing, playing, and moving. There is a place for technology in the classroom and I want to share how I use Google Sites with my students to teach the orchestra.
Each year I teach a unit on the Instruments of the Orchestra to my eighth graders. I've always begun the unit in the classes immediately following their Music Sharing that happens in late-January/early-February. It's a great way to shift to something completely different that then leads us into more musical learning and evaluating of pieces later on in the year. Every year I've presented the information in different ways and always felt like a partner project would help them learn more and give them more freedom to learn the information in a new way. So this year I decided to have students work with a partner to create a Google Site about the orchestra.
Google Sites is a platform that allows anyone to create a simplistic website and allows people to collaborate together at the same time. I love this because every student can be working at the same time on different elements within the presentation. You can link a wide variety of media onto the site including any google materials such as forms, sheets, docs, slides. You can add YouTube videos, students can link online images, and there are a whole bunch of ideas out there for what you can do with the Google Sites platform. And there are a variety of templates to use. You can add multiple pages to the Site. It's easy to use. Students understand it quickly and bonus - it's totally free.
Before you begin asking students to use this tool, it's always best to play around with it yourself. You also want to make sure you know what content you are wanting your students to create before beginning a project and doing it yourself so you can test out how it is done. And you'll know any hiccups that they may encounter along the way.
I knew that I wanted my students to create a Site about the instruments in the orchestra. I knew that I wanted them to have a main page with an overview of what the orchestra is and four pages dedicated to each individual family - the strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. I wanted students to go beyond simply inserting pictures of instruments and then writing short snippets about each instrument. Though there was some of that, but I wanted them to do it in a more interesting and creative way. I wanted them to have some creative outlets for how they could share the information.
In looking for how other educators have used Google Sites, I came across the idea of a bingo page where each square asks students to present information about the given topic. The bingo page I found was not aimed at the orchestra, but I modified it to fit what I was wanting students to demonstrate within their learning. There are many ways for students to display their learning and so providing choice is a great idea. After all, we're going for understanding of content and how fun for students to have options for how they want to show that content.
My bingo grid is 5x4 with five squares going across the top and four squares going down, equaling 20 squares total, which means there are twenty options. Choices inside of the squares included students creating a video of themselves sharing information about a specific instrument. They could create a fake Facebook page as orchestral composer and in that, their fake friends would be people who had known the composer or had been involved in their life. The posts would refer to pieces composed or the personal life of that composer. You could also pretend to have students be an artist and update about styles of music within either the orchestra or different genres that were performed. Or some of my students were really creative and pretended to be a specific instrument in the orchestra. For example, Mr. Tim P. Ani was timpani and he had the friends 'Snare Drum,' 'Bass Drum,' and other instruments within his section and then the posts were all about the types of things that they were creating. And it was just a fun way for them to demonstrate what the instruments sounded like, but also give them a little bit of fun to be creative with it. And they really enjoyed that.
Another idea was that they could create memes about instruments, incorporating facts within the memes. They could create a Google Form quiz about a family of instruments, write a poem, create a short comic strip, record a podcast, tell a story about an orchestral piece, and so on. And then in the bottom square, the bottom square in the right hand corner, students were offered the opportunity to create their own idea to get it approved by me. Some of the students mentioned creating a type of online game like a Jeopardy game and they could create that with the questions within the Jeopardy game. I can't think of what the other ones were, but they had some really great ideas for that one.
I asked my students to choose three squares for each page that they would create. However, they could not repeat any of the squares so this would mean that they would use a total of twelve squares from the twenty square bingo grid and show their learning a multitude of ways. In addition to using three ideas from the bingo grid, they had to also write a short description of each instrument in each family, except the percussion family because there are so many percussion instruments. I simply asked them to choose five-six instruments to provide information.
PROCESS
So here's a little bit about the process and how I went about with this project. Having never taught the information in this way before, I honestly wasn't sure as to how long it would take students to complete each step and produce a final product that was thorough and well-organized. Initially I had planned it to take four class periods which is roughly about four and a half hours since I see them for seventy minute periods, but it took six class periods. So the class periods broke down into the following order:
First Class: Overview of the project, basics of how to add pages, insert pages, expectations, and then beginning the main page that day. I was really fortunate to have one of our technology facilitators present information during the first class about Google Slides. Mary Torres gives students information about how to set up the Google Site, how to share it with their partner and myself, how to add the pages, information, and so on. It was very helpful.
Second Class: Main page.
Third Class: First page - information about one family of their choosing and reviewing/editing main page
Fourth Class: Second page and finishing first page
Fifth Class: Third page
Sixth Class: Fourth Page
Seventh Class: The students gave presentations to their class and I asked them for student feedback along the way. In this seventh class, while students presented their Google Sites to the class, the class could ask questions about what the students had learned and how they created their site, as well as why they chose to demonstrate why they chose those three elements from the bingo chart for their project. Each student had the same rubric that I was using to grade while they were watching their peers present the information and then they could fill out information about the presentations as we went. Their insights were very helpful and they often mentioned things that I had overlooked. And while they were not grading their peers, the insights were definitely invaluable
I'll definitely review how I want the presentation portion to look next year because I felt that it was a lot of regurgitation of the same information from each group and students were really sure what more to say about their sites. They shared information about the instruments and showed what they had created, but its as a lot of, "and here's the violin and we've already heard that the violin has, you know, whatever the information was..." or "here's my strings page and I used three aspects about the bingo sheet" or you know, "this is the video we put on the Sites - the String Quartet by Haydn," and then they would play a portion of it.
But being that it was all the same information shared, despite creating it in different ways within their Sites, I will definitely restructure the presentations so that students don't feel like they're all saying the same things over and over. Something I might consider is asking a class from a younger grade to come down and have students set up small presentations in areas around the room so that my eighth graders could tell younger students from another grade level about the instruments, what they had learned, and maybe have listening stations as well. I think they'd enjoy sharing with other students rather than simply sharing the same information repeatedly with each other. This is an area I felt was the weakest part of the project for me because I need to reevaluate how this should look, sound, and feel better and give students a better understanding of what to share when presenting their material.
Throughout the process, I monitored the progress of each pair of students as they worked. There were students who were laser-focused, well-organized, who finished early and there were students who were struggling with time management throughout each period who had difficulty finishing. You'll see a variation in your classroom as well. While students worked, I would sit near a group that was less organized or focused and ask them questions along the way to guide them. Being that I was working with older students, it was important to be available for questions, but not hovering over them and telling them step-by-step. It's definitely a fine line of expecting them to work independently and also guiding when you can see that they aren't progressing or they're distracted or they're just simply not pushing themselves to get completed.
My advice on this end is to hold them accountable and be clear on expectations and hold them to it. I talked to students as we went along, updated them as to what I was seeing, and what could be done if they were feeling stuck. It's vital that you are moving from group to group throughout the class, looking for work before class, and then providing feedback. One of my favorite things about Google Sites is the ability to leave comments on the Sites for students. This was a great way to identify spelling mistakes they may have overlooked or that weren't caught, make short comments about what was still missing, and provide positive feedback about the work that had been done. It's helpful to leave the feedback between class periods and ask students to look at the comments and make corrections as recommended at the start of the class. This saves you time and you're available for other needs during class time as a result of them working on newer portions of the project.
MAKING IT WORK FOR YOU
If you're interested in trying this project with your students or creating something like it for a different concept, here are a few modifications and ideas that could make this project work for you. And I share these because you may not have 70-minute class periods and you may be working with fourth or fifth grade students who at that level are going to be writing a little more simplistically than eighth graders and for the most part. And you may be only using forty-five minute time periods and so, to modify this is still absolutely do-able and can work in your classroom. So let's talk about four different ways you could modify this project:
1) If you wanted to keep the same criteria I used where you want all of the groups to create a google site about the entire orchestra but you teach for shorter class periods, you might consider asking students to choose only one or maybe two elements from the grid rather than three. Or make it even more simplistic than that and keep it very basic with them finding pictures of the instruments, linking a video of that instrument playing, and then giving a couple of facts about each instrument.
2) The second option might be to allow groups of three or four students to work together instead of pairs. For this, each student could be in charge of one of the families of instruments and work together on the main page. It would definitely allow for work to go quicker.3) For the third one, maybe you focus only on one family of instruments rather than the entire orchestra. This could be a project that you do where within a class, you assign each group a family of instruments so that a group of students works on the strings family and their Google Site is about that family and then another one does the brass family and so on. They design a google site for that family and then each classes' page is shared with the other students in classes - either with a presentation style or you could simply have them share the document with other students to view it.
4) And then another option would be to assign one instrument per student - individually created Google Sites that a single student works on themselves. The students are each asked to learn about one instrument from one of the families of the orchestra and maybe give them options. You might have them consider creating an outline that looks like this:
Three pages:
Main page being a picture of the instrument, a few sentences about it, and a video
First page would have information about the structure of the instrument, how long it is, how it was built, how it has changed over the years, and maybe even how it is played and held
Second page could be any additional information like fun facts or famous pieces that feature the instrument or something that relates to them...maybe they have a family member that plays the viola! Sharing something shorter.
PROJECT IDEAS
Maybe this project sounds like a great idea, but the concept of instruments isn't one that you do a unit with your older students and you do that with younger. And so if you were wanting something for different ages, there are different concepts that would make great Google Sites projects so I'm also going to share four concepts that you might use Google Sites for:
1) Peter and the Wolf
Love this. Love Prokofiev. So the main page could be a short synopsis of the story and then have a page about each character and their corresponding instruments. That would be a great one to work in a large group.
2) Musical Forms
Maybe the main page gives the definitions of the musical forms and you could have one page about each form whether it's a rondo, AB form, ABA form, theme and variation
3) The Nutcracker
Similar to Peter and the Wolf where students could share their favorite part of the ballet, describe what ballet is, and then possibly pull out music pieces that they have learned and listened to and share about what is happening in the music or linking to other videos online for comparison standpoints. I love the idea of Google Sites projects working with books because children love stories and for them to be able to retell a story is a great way to integrate language arts as well into your lesson!
4)Music Notes, Staff, and Concepts
And a fourth idea for creating a Google Site with students is a little more lengthy, but could be developed over time. And I don't really have this one as fleshed out as the others. I feel like those are more tangible, but stick with me and see what you think. So the idea would be that this progresses over time and the students build on it throughout the year as they learn new music notes and about the music staff. So whether you are creating it for them or I guess they could be creating it along the way, the first page could be about the music staff and pictures of music notes. Maybe how to speak them, how long the beats are, and kind of basic information about the structures of the music notes and basics about the music staff. And then on following pages, students could share information that they know about, say, the quarter note. And from the quarter note, they could share a song that they learned with the quarter note in it and they could record themselves speaking or singing the song or the chant that they have learned in class. And then maybe the next page is the eighth note pairs and then the next page would be the quarter rest. And on each page students could explain what it is, post songs that they have learned about it, and identify the different music symbols, I'll say, along the way.
And so over time that could be built and it kind of be like a personal site that helps them build their musical vocabulary. So just a thought for that one.
Consider the topics you share with your students that require them to sit and listen and then think about if these are that you might want to look into modifying and adding technology or changing up in another way. Because I truly believe as music educators that our role is to help students make music and by making music, my opinion, I believe they should be singing. They should be playing. They should be moving. They should be creating. And that they should physically be doing something that makes a musical outcome. And if technology is simply only used so that we can check a box and say that we are using technology and we're just using it, but it's not very purposeful, then take the technology away and go back to basic music making where your students are singing, playing instruments, and moving.
Technology should be an asset and it should be a tool, but it should not rule our classrooms. The music making should come out of the students and the technology should be used to help enhance what would have been if students were sitting and simply listening. So - anyway. Get off my soapbox.
So the final thing is student feedback. After we complete a project like this, I always ask for student feedback. I'm able to really find out what students learned, what they found to be valuable, and ideas for how to make the project better. Sure, you might receive a few responses where there's not as much information given back or where the students say, 'No, it was good' or 'I enjoyed the project,' 'There isn't anything I like,' but honestly the vast majority of the time, students really do want to share their thoughts and they have a lot to say, especially if they know that you are asking out of sincerity because you really want them to get as much out of this project and out of the Google Site and their learning and that they can share their insights without being judged and with an open-minded teacher who really wants to make it better for the next group coming.
So I asked students for feedback and I recorded their responses with permission. And I think it's really great to be able to hear from the students themselves as to what they thought of the project. So I'm going to have you listen to a couple of their responses and they were asked what they enjoyed about creating the Google Site project because this was the first time that they had ever created a Google Site project in any of their classes. I asked them what they didn't enjoy or what was challenging, what they learned overall, and what they would change about the project. So here is what my students said:
If you're interested in seeing the bingo sheet that I created and the outline, as well as a few examples of student work and what they created using Google Sites, I'll have all of that linked on the blog at afternoonti.blogspot.com. (See below under Links to Materials)
Google Sites is an amazing platform and such a great way for students to show their learning. I highly encourage you to try it out and would love to hear what ideas you have and what you've used in your classroom. Particularly with Google Sites.
LINKS TO MATERIALS
How to create a Google Site
Online Tools for Project
Cover Page for Packet
Google Bingo Page
Rubric
**For student examples, some materials may be blocked and not displayed on the pages, but you'll get an idea of what students' work looked like.
Student Example Site #1
Student Example Site #2
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