YouTube’s massive platform offers many benefits to the music scholar working in the public sphere. Engaging in such work is easy on YouTube, where an entire sub-genre of “Explainer” videos proliferates on virtually any topic. Music scholars, and …
Given the current pandemic, all academic conferences have shifted online; some more successfully than others! This year, I was lucky enough to be selected to give a short talk on a panel about public musicology, and of course I chose to speak about my work making videos on the Dies irae. Here is a link to my (slightly stuffy) academic talk. It’s not exactly a “how-to” video, but more of a behind-the-scenes look at some of my (admittedly unique) decisions.
Here in New England, we get a fair amount of snow. Because of this, I usually build in a few classes that can be taught online. Given the likelihood that some of us will be teaching online in the not-so-distant future, I thought it might be helpful to layout my workflow for creating a listening quiz that can be given online.
These steps are based on Apple products (a MacBook computer, iTunes and iMovie), and designed to thwart a student’s use of Shazam to help identify listening examples.
Most of my classes meet once a week, so I tend to start each class with a small, low-stakes warmup quiz. These quizzes serve a few different functions: they help us draw connections in class, from week-to-week; they help me gauge attendance; and they show me what information is landing with my students and where I can improve.
I have found that the combination of multiple-choice questions on a Google Form and Flubaroo, a free add-on in the Google ecosystem, makes this process of weekly quizzes a manageable one.
In the following essay, I will describe not only why Twitter is a better alternative to the listening journal, but also how it creates a more dynamic, interactive and engaged student-teacher relationship.