I found out recently that our campus has been approved for a grant to wifi the entire campus. Also, our Principal has ordered 10 iPads for other teachers on our campus to utilize. One of the main reasons he gave for this purchase came out of his conversations with me about using Zangle on my iPad. So now not only will I have Internet To use Zangle and other applications in my room, but maybe even out to football field for marching band events??? We can hope!
Another update to my previous post. I tried it this past week and the Read It Later app does not project through VGA. That is unfortunate. If you just want to show content of a website I have found a work around, but if you want to interact with the site (click links, watch movies, etc.) this does not work. So what you can do is on a regular computer, take a screenshot of the page you want to view and save it as an image. Email the image to yourself and then download it into saved images on your iPad. Then place that image on a slide in a keynote presentation, and it will project. Not the best, but if you lack wifi and want to show something from the web, it's a way around.
I don't know about you, but this week we got YouTube unblocked in our rooms. I was able to access some great musical examples for my students (check out these bands). I also had a somewhat lighthearted opportunity to use YouTube to help students understand diatonic chord functions and notation with Capt Broccoli, Musicologist. All fun aside, there is SO much educational media on YouTube, I really hope that the district continues to allow access to it.
Over our break, the one work related thing I did work on was updating the band's website and incorporating social media. I decided to migrate the page away from school notes.com (which I've been using since 2005- my students were 10 then!) and use the blogger platform for our website instead. Upsides: easy to design, easy to add information (including by email!). Use of google gadgets on the page (check my calendar- it's linked to my iPad calendar), sleek look. One major downside: blocked at school. But I send my updates during the day via email and it updates right away. I'm happy with it so far. Check it out: www.mhsband.info
Along with that, I started a band facebook page, as well as a band twitter account. My reasoning for this was one simple conversation with a kid at a formal concert who was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. It went like this: Me "why don't you have your dress clothes on?". Student: " I didn't know there was a concert until today and my dress clothes are dirty.". Me: "the concert was on the calendar you've had since august, plus I emailed a reminder to you last week.". Student: "I threw the calendar away and I never check my email, I just have that to get a facebook. Email is too slow". So that was it. Notes home end up on the floor and email is too slow. So all my announcements now go on the website, on facebook, and on twitter.
The interesting thing is that I don't need the iPad at all to do this. Blogger and facebook both had direct email updating, and you can update twitter on email via a service called Tweetymail. So you can do all this stuff, even from school, pretty easily. I still send the "slow" email reminders to students and parents, but I also BCC the addresses for facebook, the website, and Tweetymail, and then they are there too!
I also have an iPad app called HootSuite that is useful if I want to post something quickly. It's blocked at school, but it has a schedule feature, so you can do the updates at home (or star bucks... Wherever) and have them send when you want. For example, the first day of class this week I sent a message at 5:00 am "Welcome back! Don't forget your instrument!". I was in bed at 5:00 am, but that message was there when the kids woke up and logged on, and at least two kids admitted to me that they remembered their instrument only because they saw that post.
Check out the MhS Band Facebook Page here and follow us on Twitter too (@mantecaband)
The next project I'm working on is mass-text reminders, because even more than facebook, the kids are ALWAYS on their phones!
I also have that promised best music apps blog in the works. So many new music apps have come on the market in the past couple of weeks, I'm going to take some time to try some things out before I get to that post...
