Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Classroom Observation 3: Laptops for Efficiency

First off, I know I skipped observation 2. I will come back to it. I just finished observation 3 and though I should report one quick use of the laptops. I visited a choir class, and it integrated technology in great ways. One way was to gain efficiency.

The teacher use a free site called cyberbass.com which has hundreds of songs broken out into their parts. Looking at the list it is limited to songs in the public domain. Since they are learning a Vivaldi piece the students took out their laptops and listend each to their own part for two minutes before practicing. They repeated this for longer when they were learning a new part.

Afterwards the teacher explained that this saved time. Before the laptops he would have played each section's part individually, taking four times the class time. This also creats a managment problem with the other three quarters of the choir. Sitting in the back and timing these events I calculated that he could practice an extra song during a class period. That is 176 extra songs a year.

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