Hello, my name is Janine Brown and I'm an assistant professor of music theory at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. I've taught online courses ranging from asynchronous, remote, and hybrid, as well as face-to-face courses for over 15 years. No matter the method of course delivery, I really enjoy using various technologies to improve my teaching in student learning. I truly believe that my courses are more successful with technologies like Panopto and SmartMusic, to name a few. At my institution, I teach required classes for all music majors, where students learn how to train their musical ear. In this video, I'm going to talk about ways that I've used technology to improve my courses born out of two pedagogical problems that I was having with assessments surrounding my main learning objectives. First, one learning objective in my course is to teach students to be able to look at musical notation and then audiate how it sounds. A frequent type of assessment is asking students to sing and assign melody. However, I don't have enough time in class to hear all students sing individually. Further, once one students sings the assignment in class, other students learn from that performance and then can repeat it without ever grappling with the concepts themselves, reducing the efficacy of the assignment. To solve this problem, I instead ask all students to record themselves singing the melody at home, building skills on their own. There are also additional benefits to doing this. For example, students can learn from scrutinizing their own performance and they can re-record themselves if needed before uploading the video for a grade by the due date, teaching them to critically analyze their pitch and rhythm. While this does take away the element of live performance in class, I can then test this on the spot skill separately in another type of assessment. Asking students to record their assignments at home also provides disability accommodations that would be outed in class and mitigate students stress levels, singing alone in front of peers. Another benefit is that when I'm grading the recording, I can write something like you sing the wrong note at one minute in 10 seconds and students can then review this moment and learn from it. In contrast, if they had sang for me in class live, they may not remember what they did and they can't learn from my comment. I ask students to record their singing assignments using a technology called Panopto for a variety of reasons : it's a third party tool directly within our LMS, it's been vetted for use on all device types, recordings don't take up any storage space in my course nor on student devices, Panopto is free to both me and also the students, thanks to my institutions licensing of it, and it's video recording capabilities are important to me, as opposed to an audio recording technology where I can't see student faces and they could be using the aid of an unseen tool. I augment these singing assignments using a browser-based tool called SmartMusic, which gives students immediate feedback as they're practicing their melody. When students are practicing at homes, SmartMusic is providing automated feedback as to what they're doing correctly and incorrectly. I can't be everywhere at the same time, especially when students are doing their homework in the middle of the night. I'd encourage you to also think about ways to use technology to multiply yourself. There are certainly some drawbacks to SmartMusic that I've written about in one of your readings. It requires lots of upfront work setting it up and some regular maintenance by the instructor, and it also carries a cost. However, the benefits of using it far outweigh the cons. I'd recommend seeking out ways to utilize immediate feedback in your own courses as this is invaluable when students are working with your course materials outside of class. I also solved another pedagogical problem in my courses with technology. That is, another learning objective is to teach students to hear music and to know what it would look like written in music notation. To teach this, I frequently play short musical excerpts, scaffolded in difficulty and ask students to write what they're hearing on musical staff paper. Now, when in class, I'll walk around the room to student desks to see how they're doing, but I found that this was insufficient because I can only visit one student at a time. Worse in an online setting like Zoom, this is impossible to do because students would be holding up their answer to the camera and it would be blurry and it would give away the answer to other students. But this can all be solved using a website called whiteboard.chat, where I can see what all students are writing in real-time on their own virtual whiteboards. Conversely, students can only see my whiteboard with a prompt and not each others. Students join my whiteboard class through the browser and I see little boxes with their individual work on my screen, I then know who's doing well and who is not doing well at the same time, and I can provide feedback to my students in the chat where my feedback is more private than when I would be talking with students at their desks, which was a concern because our conversation might reveal part of the answer to a neighboring student. While an additional benefit of whiteboard.chat is that it's free, there are also drawbacks. Students are using it outside of the LMS, and when writing music, I found that it's best to use a stylus on a tablet or an iPad, rather than using a trackpad, which isn't possible for all students. Overall, I'm a firm believer that technology can help us with providing immediate and private feedback to students. There are so many apps and websites out there that can help improve your own teaching, so have fun thinking about what can be better in your courses? Be flexible and creative and choose a technology that you genuinely believe will improve your course with care and passion. Finally, be intentional about the technology chosen and align its use with your learning objectives. Thank you for watching.