I have always liked the idea/format of Twitter, but I have never really been able to get into it. However, when I started my Master’s Degree and learned about PLNs I gained enough interest to try it out. The first two PLNs that I joined were #GwinChat and #ForsythPLN. PLNs from the Gwinnett and Forsyth school districts, respectively, these communities discuss a variety of topics around education and 21st-century learning. For a year, I had the opportunity to serve as a discussion…

At the start of their project, our co-planning sessions are generally an even balance of speaking time between me and the student. As the students start to make significant progress on their projects, they begin to take a more active role in the co-planning sessions. The students generally provide me with a summary of what they have learned, what they have worked on, and what they plan on doing next. During these updates, I probe them about the process they are taking towards completing their…

As students progress through my music technology courses, they come to realize the wide variety of careers related to the class. From a top 40 musician to a recording engineer or a foley artist to a lawyer, the jobs are pretty endless. By the time the students reach the third course, they have a pretty good idea of which aspect of the curriculum they enjoy the most. To help nurture their interest, I work with them to plan and develop a capstone project which focuses our curriculum around their…

When teachers design learning modules, they start by selecting the resources that they believe to be the most useful. The teacher is the expert on curriculum and pedagogy, so these resources may be the best but they tend to be centered around how the teacher learns. Each student has different learning needs, so curated menus can be a great resource for teachers to expand their learning modules. As I am researching resources to design a module, I maintain a list of everything I look at and feel…

A natural part of the creative process is getting the opinions of your peers and bouncing ideas off of them. When COVID pushed instruction online, this physical interaction evaporated almost entirely as I had no mechanism in place to facilitate this in an online format in a meaningful way. When this issue persisted into August with half of my class online and the other half in school, I knew that this was an aspect of my learning environment for which I had to find a solution. It was at this…