Get learning assistance at www.irealb.
com and www.musictheory.net.
Responding to Music Activity Types
Music educators strive to develop
students’ abilities to listen to, describe, analyze, and evaluate music
as well as understand its historical
and cultural contexts and appreciate
its relationships to other disciplines,
including other art forms. Rich media
technologies are especially appropriate for learning activities to develop
musical responsiveness. Five music
activity types in this category relate
to listening to and describing; five
focus on analyzing; four on evaluating; three emphasize relationships
among disciplines; and three focus on
relationships among music, history,
and culture. (See examples in the table
“Analyzing Music Activity Types.”)
Example of Music
Learning Activity Types
In all of his classes and rehearsals, a hypothetical middle school music teacher
named Sam works to refine students’
proficiency in reading music notation
and to develop their abilities to play by
ear. To this end, Sam frequently plugs
his smartphone into the classroom’s
audio system to play prerecorded harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment
tracks that he has stored in the phone.
As these accompaniments play, students clap, chant, and play rhythm and
tonal patterns presented aurally and
visually via the classroom’s interactive
whiteboard. The teacher has also begun
to use an application, iRealb (www.
irealb.com) on his smartphone that
creates accompaniments automatically
in various musical styles and for specific songs. Some of his students have
this app on their own mobile devices.
The teacher also assigns specific theory
exercises from www.musictheory.net to
help his students aurally identify and
notate patterns.
Invitation for Collaboration
Teaching music is complex and chal-
lenging. Although we have identified
69 music learning activity types, we
expect that number to increase, along
with the technologies that support
them. We invite you to help expand,
refine, and further develop this tax-
onomy. Please visit the Activity Types
wiki and share your ideas using the
email link there.
—William I. Bauer ( william.bauer@gmail.com)
is a faculty member at Case Western Reserve
University. Mark Hofer ( mark.hofer@wm.edu)
and Judi Harris ( judi.harris@wm.edu) are
faculty members in the Curriculum and
Educational Technology program at the
College of William & Mary.
