Member Spotlight – Janice Cook

Midnight Music Community member Janice Cook

Midnight Music Community member Janice Cook

Midnight Music Community Member Spotlight

The Midnight Music Community “member spotlights” let you take a sneak peek into the music tech journey (so far!) of one of our members.

Janice Cook Midnight Music Community memberThe first Spotlight article features one of my most enthusiastic action-taking members Janice Cook from Vernon Center Middle School, Vernon, CT in the USA.

Janicehas discovered that incorporating technology into her year 7 and 8 classes has enhanced engagement and collaboration in her classes.

What do you teach and where?

I teach band and general music (grade 6-8) at Vernon Center Middle School (Vernon, CT)

Name one favourite technology tool or resource that you’ve used in your music teaching

I took a 45 minute workshop on projectors, provided by a language arts teacher at our school. The course talked about what you could do with a SMART board versus what you could do with a simple projector. I realized that a projector would do everything I would ever want for my classroom. As most classrooms were moving to SMART boards, projectors were available at no cost. I asked our electrician to mount it to the ceiling and my entire approach to teaching changed overnight.

Briefly describe one tech success you and/or your students have had during a lesson

My 7th grade general music students went crazy for both Incredibox and Chrome Music Lab in the spring. The Midnight Music PD Community brought these ideas to my inbox. They seemed like a good match for my classroom so I gave it a try. It is a lot of work to troubleshoot a new technology lesson plan and determine what guidance and structure students will need to be successful.

Once I saw how engaged my students were and the level of collaboration that was taking place in the classroom I knew these would be activities that I would want to repeat again and again.

What’s your next music tech goal?

Our 8th grade students take a course called Soundtrack Creation which uses the iPad version of Garageband. These students now come with 1:1 chromebooks and I recently became a Level 1 and Level 2 Google Certified Educator. I spent a lot of time in the spring learning about how the Google tools could transform my classroom but now I am finally going live. I have always dreamed of a paperless classroom and this trimester I am using Google Classroom to deliver the Soundtrack Creation course.

There are bumps along the way (as anyone who has worked with Doctopus and Goobric can attest) but I think it is good to model for our students that we are constantly learning, and failing, and persevering right along with them.

Tell us why you decided to join the Midnight Music Community. What’s your favorite thing about it?

In the spring of 2015 we found out that we had the opportunity to add two new general music courses. As we looked at the new standards

[USA] we discussed how we were addressing Creating, Performing, and Responding and also how well our middle school courses aligned to the high school electives.

We decided to add an Exploring Music Composition course for our grade 7 students and the Soundtrack Creation course became our 8th grade music technology offering. I had very little music technology background other than Finale at that time but there was no question that it was what our students needed next in their sequence so I was ready to dive in.

I began reading some books and taking some online courses but the materials offered by Katie Argyle stood out as the most relevant to my classroom. The Midnight Music Community came along at just the right time for me. Knowing that I have colleagues who can help me troubleshoot gives me the confidence to try new technology in my classroom.

What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing when it comes to music technology in education?

There are many restrictions placed on devices within a school setting. Sometimes I find a great lesson and try it out on my home iPad and get excited about the potential only to find later that there is a roadblock preventing me from bringing that experience to my classroom.

Sharing files, saving files, backing up files, etc on the classroom set of iPads and within Google Classroom has taken a significant amount of time and research. I am constantly worried about another student deleting or editing a student’s work from one class period to another. Students often authorize updates without a second thought and at once that class set of iPads is out of sync Air Dropping becomes difficult and screenshot worksheets may no longer resemble what students are seeing on their screens.

It is worthwhile to work through these struggles and I am grateful for what I have learned along the way but there are certainly some growing pains while bringing technology into the music classroom.

If you could give one piece of advice to a brand new music teacher regarding the use of technology in music education what would it be?

Baby steps. Find a way to bookmark all the things that catch your eye but only choose one or two to try at a time. Really devote time to maxing out that new technology trick. Find all the ways it can enhance student learning. Identify all the ways it can make your life as a teacher more efficient.

Dive in to perfect those one or two things and then step back and evaluate which one or two might be the next step.

 

Need help with technology? Join the other teachers inside the Midnight Music Community

Join Janice and hundreds of other music teachers just like her inside the Midnight Music Community where you can find personalised help and step-by-step instructions for using technology in your music teaching. There are online courses, lesson plans, tips and tutorials – all designed especially for music teachers.

Learn more about the Midnight Music Community here.

 

Music technology courses for teachers

Leave A Comment

You might also like...

Introducing

The Midnight Music Community

An online community where music tech professional development, lesson ideas, and accountability come together.
Ultimate Free Music Tech Resource Guide Guide 2023/24

Download Now for FREE...

The Ultimate Music Tech Resources Guide for 2023-2024

Claim your copy of our annual guide to free music technology resources, designed especially for music teachers. Discover interactive music websites, software, productivity tools, and assessment resources you can use in your music classroom for free.

Follow Me on Social Media

PRIVACY POLICY

This is the Privacy Policy for the Midnight Music website located at www.midnightmusic.com (“Site”).

The Site is operated by Midnight Music Pty Ltd ABN 87 619 652 603 (“Midnight Music” or “Company” or “we” or “us”).

Midnight Music understands the importance of protecting your personal information and undertakes to adhere to this privacy policy at all times to ensure your personal information is effectively safeguarded.

Information you provide to us

The Site provides various places for users to provide information. We collect information that users provide by filling out forms on the Site, communicating with us via contact forms, responding to surveys, search queries on our search feature, providing comments or other feedback, providing information when ordering a product or service via the Site, and other circumstances where collecting personal information is reasonable and permitted by the Laws of the State of Victoria, Australia.

We use information you provide to us to deliver the requested product and/or service, to improve our overall performance, and to provide you with offers, promotions, and information.

Information we collect through automatic data collection technology

As you navigate through the Site, we may use automatic data collection technologies including Google Analytics to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns. This will generally include information about your location, your traffic pattern through our Site, and any communications between your computer and our Site. Among other things, we will collect data about the type of computer you use, your Internet connection, your IP address, your operating system, and your browser type.

The information we collect automatically is used for statistical data and will not include personal information. We use this data to improve our Site and our service offerings. To the extent that you voluntarily provide personal information to us, our systems will associate the automatically collected information with your personal information.

Use of cookies and pixels

Similar to other commercial websites, our Site utilises a standard technology called “cookies” and server logs to collect information about how our site is used. Information gathered through cookies and server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our site, and the websites visited just before and just after our own, as well as your IP address.

A cookie is a very small text document, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier. When you visit a website, that site’s computer asks your computer for permission to store this file in a part of your hard drive specifically designated for cookies. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser’s preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

The Company reserves the right to use technological equivalents of cookies, including social media pixels. These pixels allow social media sites to track visitors to outside websites so as to tailor advertising messages users see while visiting that social media website. The Company reserves the right to use these pixels in compliance with the policies of the various social media sites.​

How we manage personal information

Midnight Music undertakes to take all commercially reasonable steps to ensure that all personal information collected by us is accurate, up-to-date, complete and stored securely. When your personal information is no longer required for the purposes which Midnight Music uses personal information, all commercially reasonable steps will be undertaken to securely destroy that information.

How your personal information will be used

We use personal information for purposes of presenting our Site and its contents to you, providing you with information, providing you with offers for products and services, providing you with information about your subscriptions and products, carrying out any contract between you and the Company, administering our business activities, providing customer service, and making available other items and services to our customers and prospective customers.
From time-to-time, we may use the information you provide to us to make you offers to purchase products and services provided by third parties in exchange for a commission to be paid to us by such third parties. Should you opt to take part in such promotions, the third parties will receive your information.

Disclosure of your information

Midnight Music considers personal information we collect about you to be confidential and will not disclose such information to third parties except in the following circumstances:

  • Where you have consented to your personal information being provided to a third party;
  • Where Midnight Music is required by law to disclose your information; and
  • Gaining access to your personal information held by Midnight Music

Except in circumstances where access to your personal information may be denied by the Privacy Act or other Law of the State of Victoria, Australia, your personal information will be provided to you upon request.

Visitors’ General Data Protection Regulation rights

If you are within the European Union, you are entitled to certain information and have certain rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These include the following:

  • We will retain the any information you choose to provide to us until: (a) you ask us to delete the information; (b) we decide to cease using our existing data providers; or (c) the Company decides that the value in retaining the data is outweighed by the costs of retaining it.
  • You have the right to request access to your data that the Company stores and the rights to either rectify or erase your personal data.
  • You have the right to seek restrictions on the processing of your data.
  • You have the right to object to the processing of your data and the right to the portability of your data.
  • To the extent that you provided consent to the Company’s processing of your personal data, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based upon consent that occurred prior to your withdrawal of consent.
  • You have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority that has jurisdiction over issues related to the General Data Protection Regulation.
  • We require only the information that is reasonably required to enter into a contract with you. We will not require you to provide consent for any unnecessary processing as a condition of entering into a contract with us.

Contact us

Should you have any queries in relation to the above or require further information regarding the Privacy Policy please contact us:

Midnight Music Pty Ltd
PO Box 219
Glen Waverley
Victoria 3150
AUSTRALIA

Email address: support@midnightmusic.com