The final class! It is rather remarkable that it is already here, but I am glad to have made some progress in the program. In class, we talked about everyone’s team inquiry projects, which is interesting to see what people chose and how they went about it.

Discussing the future of education in groups was interesting, and I think people’s teachable subjects affect their ideas of education and technology in the future. For music, I don’t think that technology is going to take over the methods we use now, but it can help innovate a western, euro-centric, traditional method. Using technology to assess and individualize learning is very valuable to me and I have been creating options to create using technology for assessments in the units I plan. My group talked about outside as a classroom, and I raised accessibility from a perspective of mobility and hearing, and the importance of keeping diverse learners involved and being proactive.

We also discussed our fears and shifts we see how people younger than us interact with technology and we expressed fear of students being unable to be away from their phones to the point they are unable to work a job after school, collaborate with others and communicate ideas through face to face interaction. I see this already in my younger co-workers who have a lower level of basic professionalism (body language, the wording of conversation, etc) and that has a lot to do with their relationships to technology. They are distracted and feel the need to constantly be talking to everyone they are friends with about whatever topic, and most of them and not important enough to warrant the distraction they cause. Even in their own spelling abilities, the constant use of autocorrect with not make them able to spell, or bother learning. Personally, I love autocorrect because I can not spell, not because of technology, just because I am naturally awful at it and my brain can’t think about it or remember words. I think technology is what we allow it to be as teachers. I will be fairly strict on phones personally, because being on your phone in a music ensemble is ruining everyone’s learning, because everyone’s voice matters in music and it is a team activity.

To be frank, I do not think some things we talk about (mainly cell phones in class) need to be such a frequent topic. Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but as professionals, we are being hired to use our ideas, pedagogies and professional opinion to set rules in our classrooms and teach the students. Use your opinion and knowledge of your subject and class to create policies and stick to them. People trust their doctors to make choices for them that are best for them, and teachers are not different in my opinion. Obviously, students will not die if you do not let them be on TikTok in class but have a policy that is rooted in research and professional opinion.

So, what is the future? It is everything and anything we want it to be, but at the end of the day, my pedagogy is centred around one simple question;

“How much is a student WORTH”

This course has been interesting and I found the most value in the legal side (FIPPA/Privacy, copyright and Creative Commons, etc) of technology in the classroom. So, though not everything in this class is overly applicable to music, there are ideas that are useful, like Kahoot (and how rules change), basic editing, and ways to use technology to collaborate anonymously with peers and give feedback, among other things. I appreciate what we went over and if I TOC in the future I will use more of these methods. So, thank you for this term, and my apologies I couldn’t bring the FM, the flooding has delayed it.

Sincerely,

-Katherine