Brian Moore, associate professor of music education in the Glenn Korff School of Music, is using his skills and interest in technology to provide his students with a whole new kind of education experience using iPads.
Moore, who has taught at UNL since 1986, says that he got involved teaching with technology back in the mid 70s when he was teaching music to middle and high school students in Madison, Wisc.
“In 1979 our school purchased an Apple II computer for $1,700 and it got you uppercase letters only, a green phosphor screen and we could play four notes at once. There just really wasn’t an easy way to have computers interact with musical instruments back then.”
That began to change when Moore wrote a federal grant that funded a computer lab for the middle school instrumental program at the school where he taught. They hired an electrical engineering graduate student to try to design circuit boards to connect a musical keyboard to a computer, and Moore and the band director learned how to write basic software programs.
“I got into this as kind of a side project because I wanted to help students learn how to compose music,” Moore said. “And a lot of middle school and high school students have some really good musical ideas, but if they don’t play piano very well or if they only play a band instrument or say they only play violin, they aren’t going to be able to play four parts and be able to hear what it sounds like.”
With the new software, students were able to think of a piece of music and put it into the computer then hear it played back to them. Moore also did ear training programs with his students, teaching them to be able to recognize certain musical components by sound, and helping them to recognize notes on a page, all back before that kind of technology was prevalent in the music classroom.
A lot has changed over the years in terms of technology, and now Moore is able to do things that he never imagined would be possible. One of the most useful pieces of technology, according to Moore, is the iPad, which has allowed students with absolutely no knowledge of composing music to write songs. You can even compose music with a group of up to four people with four different iPads. Moore says that the iPad has also become a professional level recording device.
Another way iPads are changing the classroom is through the publication of e-books, which Moore and Associate Professor of Music History Tony Bushard have started getting into. They have already collaborated on one e-book for an intro level music appreciation class in which they gave a free copy of their book to any student who purchased an iPad for the class.
“The e-book stemmed from a place of not really being satisfied with what was out there already in as far as texts for introductory music appreciation classes,” Bushard said.
One thing that Bushard and Moore liked about creating the e-book was that they could be in total control of the content. They could do everything from adding in music samples to familiarize students with a certain style to showing them paintings and sculptures that pertain to the time period they were learning about.
“They are able to interact with it in a much more rich way than just putting on headphones and listening to the music, and that’s something I think they appreciate,” Moore said.
Last February, Moore was honored as an Apple Distinguished Educator for his work on the e-book and since then he has done presentations on how to teach others to incorporate the same thing into their own classrooms. One presentation he did last October at the National Association for Music Education in Nashville, Tenn. was so popular there weren’t enough seats to accommodate the guests.
“Creating e-books is not terribly difficult,” Moore said. “It takes a little time, but you can create some things that are really amazing and interactive and tailored to the students you are working with, and you don’t even have to have programming skills.”
Overall, Moore says that the students have been responding to the e-book positively. More than 80 percent of them purchased an iPad so they could receive the free e-book. However, there still were some students who didn’t purchase it.
Some colleges on campus require students to bring their own technology to the classroom. The College of Journalism and Mass Communications, for example, requires students to bring their own laptop. Both Moore and Bushard said that the Glenn Korff School of Music may be moving toward an iPad requirement in the near future due to its increasing importance in the classroom. However, Bushard says that the cost of the iPad is worth it for students because they will be able to get free e-books as well as use the iPads in other classes.
When asked if he thinks students are losing anything by depending on iPads to get an education in music, Bushard said that he doesn’t think so. In fact he says that they are able to get more out of their education than ever before.
“When I was in school, professors put the things that students needed to listen to on cassette tapes,” Bushard said. “I would sit there and take notes then I would go back later and study my notes, but with an iPad you can just type the notes right in and from there you can create flashcards and a bunch of other things. It’s a lot better now than in used to be.”
Moore has a similar opinion: “I like to think of it as a tool, and there are some things that you simply can’t do without the technology. So I think it does more good than harm.”
--By Miranda Milovich, College of Journalism and Mass Communications