Musical skills within one click

How to increase the motivation and involvement of students

The teachers of the School of Music and JPC decided to update their digital resources, replacing classroom blackboards with interactive monitors Clevertouch Plus Lux, to initiate their students in music education intuitively.

Published in: Nº 32 of the EDUCACIÓN 3.0 Magazine

At 550 meters from the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, there is this center that for 25 years has been providing music education to students of all ages, levels, aptitudes, conditions and origins. For classes with a higher degree of difficulty, such as reading musical notes, those in charge considered it necessary to integrate resources closer to the students' daily experience to motivate them and, in turn, increase their performance. Therefore, they decided to acquire five interactive Clevertouch Plus Lux monitors (distributed in Spain by Charmex).

"We counted on the advice of the company Red Green Blue Audiovisual and with the formation of Charmex, with the aim of modernizing us", explains Yolanda Mallofré, professor and coordinator of the musical and digital resources of the school.

Previously, they used to use computers and projectors to visualize some resource, but "with the monitors it is easier for the students to get involved in the contents, because they can interact directly with the touch screen and get more involved in the topics we are dealing with", highlights Mallofré . After a year of the implementation of these teams, the coordinator points out that the interaction and participation of the students has increased.

Specifically, for sensitization and musical language, they have a piano game with which the students of Infantil learn the notes. Similarly, they delve better into the auditory dictation - where notes and rhythm are treated in a more technical way - with applications that work intervals adding several instruments. This makes it easier for students to develop a sense of hearing and recognize different timbres. As the coordinator points out: "If they learn only with piano, then differentiating the same notes in a trumpet or double bass is more difficult. Therefore, it is important to use different instruments. "

In addition, the school has used multimedia material such as animations and videos to work the musicogram (an active form of musical listening), which uses a visual representation of the work through different graphic symbols such as drawings or diagrams. "We also use monitors in corals. So instead of having the lyrics of the songs on a sheet, we put it on the monitor and we get the students to be in a more upright position and concentrate better on the intonation, "he explains.
Musical skills within one click

ADAPTED TO THE NEEDS.

Another advantage of these monitors is that they adapt to the classes and the programming of each teacher. In fact, students come to class with the expectation not only of what they will learn, but how they will be challenged, since it is possible to create a lesson and do the activities in different ways, either individually, in pairs or groups; later, the same activity can be changed to a greater difficulty ... which increases its involvement and motivation.

According to Mallofré, they use the monitors differently according to the age of the students, for example, "with the youngest ones, from 1 to 4 years old, I use it as a type of prize or incentive in the last 10 minutes, because I know that They like playing and playing it a lot. With the older ones, it is on during the entire class because we read the books in PDF format or do different activities ".

Mallofré also highlights the ease of use of the equipment: "They are quite intuitive and if you know how to use a tablet or a mobile this is not very different, since it comes with integrated Android". Therefore, when the five teams arrived at school, the challenge for the 40 teachers was not to understand how to use them, but to find the programs and suitable applications that could work to reach their objectives.


Hence, teachers first investigate what games and activities could work best, as well as the monitors' functionalities, and then receive training from the Charmex team and be able to make a 'battery of advanced questions'.
Musical skills within one click

Parents are also satisfied to check their children's progress. As one of the Clevertouch is placed in a classroom that faces the street, "they spend the whole class looking at how good the children are. Moreover, at the end, they ask us for the link of the applications and programs to continue studying at home ".

Regarding the future, Mallofré will be encouraged to create activities from scratch to get the most out of the monitor: "Only for that I need time: first I have to do all the programming of the class and, later, each specific activity that will be focused to my goals, "he concludes.

With multitouch gamification software

Each Clevertouch monitor includes five licenses of Snowflake Multiteach software that allows teachers and students to develop interactive stories aligned with the curriculum, in addition to providing a secure community for online and small-group collaboration, as well as personalized, one-on-one instruction. "I have created several lessons and activities in Snowflake from my computer. One of my favorites is a roulette with all the names of the students, which I turn when I want them to explain a reading or their homework. So nobody fights, but raise their hands to say that their name has not yet come out and want to participate, "says Mallofré.