Reflecting on this UOS, I’ve learned a lot about technology, and how I can use them in a classroom. There is so much to explore in each topic and it provides lots of ideas for music lesson plans. The favorite skill I’m taking away from this course is video making, and Soundtrap. (I had fun in making the videos) I’m keen to use these two topics in my future classroom, as for the other programs and software, I think I need to refine my skills more in order to teach it properly..
A little concern I have is, because technology is changing so fast, therefore after 5 years or 10 years of being a school teacher, how do we keep ourselves updated to all the new gadgets and software… I’m afraid the older I grow the slower I will be at learning new things, so would it be challenging for teachers who taught 10 years in the classroom to implement new technology ideas in their classrooms?
Even though technology is a very interesting subject, I still believe as a music teacher, the traditional way shouldn’t be neglected, sometimes I think students still need some hardcore theory in order to have a better understanding of music… I guess it will be my job to find a balance between the two…

So, the topic is about mashing beats? Well I first successfully made a simple beat in soundtrap and importing one of the audio from Royals by Lorde. Everything seemed to run quite smoothly until I downloaded Ableton Live…. there are SO MANY BUTTONS.

Here is a few seconds of beats I made on sound trap, unfortunately I couldn’t get Ableton to play a sound…
I would choose soundtrap over Ableton if I was teaching this topic as its much more simpler to use, I understand that with Ableton Live, we could achieve much more, however in an education classroom, I do feel that Ableton may be too complicate.

So this is my attempt in mixing two songs… I’ve used sound trap to do this, I guess sound trap is the easier way to do simple remixing, where as the other software Ableton is more advanced. I didn’t have too much trouble playing with sound trap as we’ve done quite some work with sound trap.

In a music classroom, I would much recommend Sound Trap as its more COLOURFUL and easy to use! Ableton may be more suitable for older students such as stage 6 or even uni students as it has much more complex functions
since the music is copyright, Soundcloud cannot upload, please use the youtube link instead (:

This video will be about “how to brush your cat”. (the cheat way)The goals is to include different angle shots, embedding audio or voice overs and screen recordings! (in my case I’ve used screenshots instead)

Please excuse my room!!! I’m moving next Saturday so the house is a MESS!!

James talked about lighting and angle shots in his tutorial videos, i’ve tried to angle Godzilla in a position where the sunlight is shining on her instead of behinds her, long shots and close ups are included and a screen shots of the materials and instructions needed.

Technical Issues: Adobe Premiere and Blender seems to be rejecting my MP4 files, so in the end I used iMovie instead, because im working on a window’s laptop, iMovie isn’t available so I’ve used the Iphone app instead!

So about eBooks, so far I’ve looked at iBook Author, InDesign, and Tumult Hype.
for InDesign, I’ve had experience working for a Chinese newspaper, and i did most of the things with InDesign, it was then printed as a hard copy, and it was also available as a digital copy online. However unlike the other two software, this one didn’t include any audio or interactions.
with iBook Author, it allowed the creator to do much more, there you could include audio, video, picture descriptions and more, its competitor Tumult Hype seemed like prettier version of the free iBook Author, it allows author to create ‘animation’, however the price is $50 USD which I think is a little expensive.

Attached is an layout of the newspaper I’ve created before, and for an iBook author example; please refer to my TianTian’s eBook in the previous blog 😀

Never knew coding could be related to music, well you can do both on Sonic Pi. My understanding is the coding(names) will determine which sound will be playing and the number determine the pitch and rhythm. It automatically loops, which sounds great!!

I think this will be a very interesting program for high schoolers! However if I were to use this in a classroom, I would need lot more work on my coding skills!

In another unit, we explored using Reaper to make music for a scene in West world. its a competition held by West world’s film producers. Wish lots of technical obstacles on the way, I’ve managed to do make the first few seconds of the clip.. however, I’ve gained my self an entire library full of FREE soundtrack from Spitfire Audio that can be useful in the future 😀

So this week was about music notation software, this includes, Muse Score, Sibelius, Note flight and Finale etc. I’ve chosen to use muse score as it is the FREE version of Sibelius!

Using Musescore, I’ve re-created an ensemble arrangement for a stage 5 class. They will be playing “Howl’s Moving Castle” by Joe Hashish. this is a beautiful movie theme, and I’ve re-arranged in from a horn ensemble part downloaded from the muse score library. Musescore allow you to have the voicing of each part to your preferred instruments, and has the option of playback and audio export. Attached is the audio and re-arranged music – in pdf as mscz is not supported 😦

This is a digital artwork Jes and I made for children, it aims to introduce children to instruments families of Woodwind, Strings and Percussion. Instruments presented will be provided with Fun Facts and audio. We’ve also created a story line, where Tiantain the main character will be searching for his “Dream Instrument”. There is also with a multiple-choice question to let students “pick” the instrument for Tiantian.

Last page introduces:
– Tiantian vol. 2 Tiantian’s Journey to become a Piano Master (:

Self Reflection
Some thing we’ve learned through this project of making a children’s book is that we need to think in children’s perspective. There was lots of scratching out ideas, because we’ve found that the language is just not suitable for a children’s book, we naturally use big words, but then we realized that children may have trouble understanding, and make the book boring for them.

And of course there’s the technical problems
The most obvious one is getting to know the software and editing picture, importing audios, and trying out gadgets from iBook and other digital artwork. One of the issue were to get the audio to play the way we want. The audio would sometimes have a pop up window, when we already selected the audio to not pop up… unfortunately this issue ended up not being able to fix..

And also the pictures, first we started cropping out the background in Photoshop, then we found out iBook Author had its own background remover which worked very well.

the purpose of using an iBook rather than a physical copy is that
-digital copies are convenient to carry
-there are options of interactive activities such as audio playback, multiple choice questions, zoom up to picture (which you can add in descriptions) which makes the whole reading experience a lot more fun!
-and of course, it saves the planet (in a way)

The most challenging part of this assignment was that it does not run on Windows D:
so the assignment was done in two whole days, with me visiting Hornsby and using Jes’s computer. Some of the things each of us has done
Tiantian’s character illustration- Jes
image choices all from google – both of us
picture editing/audio importing – me
storybook layout – me
story line/plot – both of us
music selection all from you tube- Jes

one thing we could of improved on the Ebook was editing the audio file so there wouldn’t be a few second of silence

Today we learned how to make videos in Tech class, I realized that to make a good quality video a lot of high-end specs are needed, with limited material I will present you The Park Near My House.  PS. initially, I wanted to make videos of my cat but she wasn’t very keen to be my actor 😦
https://youtu.be/i-44p2-WGG0