I will be speaking at Ingenuity’s Arts Education Conference on April 5th on the topic of “Personalization in the Arts Classroom.” The session will rely heavily on tech and using apps from the Google Suite (like Google Classroom). I wanted to post a brief overview of the presentation as well as the handouts, links, and […]
21st Century Music
Student Podcasts are LIVE! (and how I published them)
Our podcasts are now LIVE on Spotify! Listen now to these amazing student crated projects. The topics you ask? Anything from Unusual Foods to the Secret Lives of Pets. If you ever wanted to know more about the first ever male Cover Girl ambassador James Charles we got you cover! Worried about Surviving a Zombie […]
8-bit Music: Original Compositions
We take a look at the history of video game music and how it was made. There is a surprisingly robust history around this topic, spanning from it’s origins to its influence on popular music today. The limitations of the early hardware meant it had to be composed in 3 or 4 tracks making it a […]
Podcasting: Content & Themes
As part of middle school electives I am currently running a course on podcasting. Beyond the technical proficiency required, the most important part of podcasting would be content. Generating topic, ideas, and themes is essential. We spent the last few periods running through the gamut of brainstorming activities to think of what is important to not just the audience, but […]
Why Arts Standards Matter
The National Core Art Standards were released in 2014, yet there are still some art educators are either resistant or not utilizing them to their fullest potential. I want to talk about how those 11 anchor standards and 4 core processes can be a great tool for art educators. Using them as platform for Advocacy, a […]
K-pop Listening Lesson
K-pop (abbreviation of Korean popular music or Korean pop; (케이팝) is a music genre originating in South Korea, characterized by a wide variety of audio-visual elements. Although it includes all genres of “popular music” within South Korea, the term is often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music drawing inspiration from a range of styles and […]
Radio & Sound: An Interactive Science Unit
You heard it here first, teaching sounds waves can be fun! We spent a full week exploring the properties of waves and vibrations, as well as amplitude and frequency. The unit culminated in two hands-on projects: building a DIY speaker from wire, magnets, and a plastic cup, and Snap Circuits FM Radio kits. However, this hands-on […]
The Anniversary of Hip Hop
On August 11, 1973, an 18-year-old, Jamaican-American DJ who went by the name of Kool Herc threw a back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. During his set, he decided to do something different, and thus the first iteration of Hip Hop was born. Hip Hop has done exactly what its […]
Google Doodle: Oskar Fischinger
Happy 117th birthday to the visionary artist Oskar Fischinger. Oskar was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. In this amazing interactive doodle it lets you not only create music but also art in real-time. It’s […]
MCA Creation Lab: A FREE Field Trip!
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago offers up to 5 free field trips per school per year. I took my middle school music class to one of their creation labs, where students worked directly with one of the museum’s resident artists to hone their creative skills. Here’s my thoughts on the trip and how […]
