Chris+Sepersky's+page

I use the Smartboard often in the music classroom. The smartboard enables students to learn content quicker and retain knowledge longer. The interactive nature of the Smartboard focuses student attention. The Smartboard has a great impact on a classroom that does not go to computer lab. Finally, the smartboard fosters the professional growth of the teacher by using new teaching strategies and (re-)writing curriculum for the 21st century.

5K students struggle with the concept of instrument "families". It involves higher level thinking skills such as sorting and grouping in logical ways. Sometimes the factors that place instruments in a family are obvious (such as the string family), while othertimes the factors are hidden (such as the woodwind family). In the past, I would talk about what makes a family, comparing instrument families to student's own families. Then I would use teacher-created manipulatives, overheads, and pictures to reinforce the learning. With the smartboard, I still related instrument families to student's own families, so the teaching itself did not change. What did change was the reinforcement activities. I created a table in Notebook software, used the camera capture tool to import pictures of instruments into the table, typed the names of families into cells, and added cell shades to make a "concentration" game. While playing almost independently, students had to decide if the instrument and the instrument family word matched. This also took reading skills. Each student took two turns at the board, and this activity can easily be used as a center activity in the future. I was impressed with how quickly the students were able to identify correct and incorrect answers while participating in this lesson, as compared to the past where some students were quick and most were slow to grasp the concept.
 * Activity #1**

My second SmartBoard activity was a quick, practical lesson. Students are currently memorizing lyrics for our upcoming concert. There are two songs which have been especially difficult to memorize, and sometimes you have to keep coming up with new and exciting ways to get kids to remember difficult lyrics. The songs are "76 Trombones" from The Music Man and "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better". In the past, I would have the students use photocopied papers, fill in the blank quizzes, putting the song on the overhead and cutting little strips of paper to cover individual lines, etc. With the SmartBoard, the students are learning these difficult pieces of music faster, and it took less teacher preparation time. For "76 Trombones", I used the camera capture tool to import the lyrics into Notebook. Then, as students sang, I either used the highlighter to highlight the challenging lyrics OR I used the Magic Pen to conceal the lyrics, which then automatically revealed themselves after the students finished that line. Students could check their work as they went along. It also caused students to read ahead and the Magic Pen certainly held their attention. For "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better", I wrote the "topic sentence" of each argument on the SmartBoard. I used two colors (red if girls sing the line, blue if boys sing it). This in itself reduced a lengthy song to 11 short statements, giving the students a positive feeling about their work. To take it a step further, I made a table and placed each "topic sentence" into a cell, added cell shades, and sang the song again. Students had to think ahead and were motivated by the possibility of removing the cell shades.
 * Activity #2**

My third SmartBoard activity is the way I introduce reading traditional 5-line staff musical notation to students (treble clef). This is a third grade lesson. This is a concept that is easy for some students and extremely difficult for others. In the past, I used whiteboards, worksheets, marbles, and all sorts of other manipulatives. There were two problems that I have found with that approach. #1 - Students are working individually rather than collaboratively, therefore unable to learn from each other's thinking processes. #2 - The teacher must check everyone's work individually, leading to the teacher spending 90% of his time with a few kids having the most trouble. I wrote this easy SmartBoard program to teach music notation by putting 5 lines and a treble clef on a page. I wrote notes that form words on the lines. I wrote the answer on the bottom and covered it with a screen shade. Students must decode the word, one note at time and check their answer by pulling down the screen shade. Now, students can think out loud in front of the class (thereby helping others whose thought process is faulty), and the teacher can check students as they work. The use of the technology greatly increases attention span because the students want to use the SmartBoard. Students learn the content much faster and a greater percentage of them master it quicker. The opposite can also be done - teacher writes the letters on the bottom and students must add the notation above.
 * Activity #3**

My fourth SmartBoard activity is the way I introduce rhythm reading to third graders using traditional numerical rhythm values. Students in 5K, 1st, and 2nd grade prepare for reading music with manipulatives and other words to replace the numbers. But third grade students should know how to read a standard 4/4 pattern using quarter notes and eighth notes using numbers. I wrote this SmartBoard program using the 16 ways you can arrange quarter notes and pairs of eighth notes to prepare students to play the linking game as a class. Students see the rhythm on the SmartBoard and must identify it correctly. Students can check their work two different ways: First, the screen shade reveals the correct numbers (a plus sign means "and" in music). Second, a speaker icon will play the correct rhythm when pressed. The instruments were recorded by the teacher playing them. Students benefit because they can check their own work and learn all 16 patterns (rather than just the one pattern in front of them at the time). Attention is held by the use of the new technology, and students benefit from listening to other student's thought processes.
 * Activity #4**