Prompt: Describe the importance of the using a variety of instructional strategies and the value they add to education of students in the 21st Century. Evaluate the role technology plays in the implementation of various instructional strategies. How will this impact your teaching of students?

By using a wider variety of instructional strategies, my students will learn more in my classroom on a daily basis. When I get away from the “normal” way of teaching I have used over the 27 years of my career, my students will benefit in the following ways:

·         not being bored with being taught in the same old fashion;

·         learning new ways of gaining musical knowledge; and

·         becoming more than just a singer or instrumentalist, but a musician.

Technology assists this new adventure in the following ways: the computer lab can be used by musicians learning music (not just downloading or playing it); students can be individually engaged , not just participants in rote teaching in choir or listening to the director dictate style and technique in band; and learning to create music written form. 

Instead of using the computer as a means of retrieving music, students will learn how to notate music through learning the various signs and symbols that are used, and by listening to the sounds such notation produces. 

Students will be individually engaged by using their own station as they learn these musical concepts while still learning their music in group fashion in band and choir rehearsals. Instead of just going to daily rehearsal, there will be separate times to learn the art of music notation through technology. 

Students will also be able to create their own compositions as they notate music, hear it played back, refine it, and even print publisher quality copies and post them on the internet.