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[school-discuss] Meeting curriculum goals utilizing Free Software - Call for info



This is an idea that has a bit of traction, so for the next step and a better definition of specifically what is being sought -

To start, a very general approach with narratives on Reading, Writing, Math, Science, Technology, and Arts would work.  Initially, I'd like to start with one for each category.

For an example of the sort of narratives that would be effective, I'd refer to Marilyns post from July 15th. (And show how the info would be worked with)
http://archives.seul.org/schoolforge/discuss/Jul-2007/msg00042.html

What aspects of this would be best to share with teachers that are looking for new and interesting ways to improve their ability to teach music?   These are my opinions and an outline of what I think could be drawn from this towards creating an effective narrative.

(Category: Arts)
Goal:  Teaching Music to 5th and 6th grade students / Rhythms & activity
1 For the past two years I have been teaching music in an intermediate school (5th & 6th grades).  
2 Both years I took my music classes to the campus computer lab once a week.  

3 I created my own web pages with links to these sites, instructions, forms for quizzes and tests, etc.
4 Musix is a live CD, it boots up as a music studio.
5 We used Solfege for learning rhythm patterns, and then the Hydrogen Drum Machine to compose our own rhythms.  

6 In the classroom I played back the compositions and we voted for our favorites.

The overall idea of the narrative would be that this is a way to teach music, specifically rhythms, with an activity of voting on favorites.  If they are curious for more information, they could leave a comment on the page or visit the discussion list for more details.  The more adventurous would visit the Musix site, where they would already have an idea/level of comfort of what they are reading about.  We could also include a 'related links' portion, similar to how it's implemented on the Education Conferences portion of SchoolForge.

If Marilyn is willing, I'd be thrilled to use her story for writing the first Arts narrative.  I'd also ask that others with successes in meeting curriculum goals share their stories (on list, off list to jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx) Feel free to pass this call for info along to anyone as well.