iBooks comes to Mac OSX: James requests the world

Something that has troubled me for over a decade as an educator is finding the best format to publish my resources in. Three years ago it troubled me so much I even wrote a blog about it. Nowadays when I’m teaching students about creating their own resources I simply encourage them to create the resources in common, non-proprietry formats and collect those in a folder so they can easily be published anywhere.

Building music education resources in 2013

Paul Stanhope and the Metropolitan Orchestra at Australian Music Day in 2012

For example, my wonderful third year music education students are currently creating some really fantastic resources on Australian works of the last 25 years that will be featured in this year’s Australian Music Day. Essentially their resources fit into five categories:

1. Text
2. Images
3. Audio
4. Video
5. Proprietary file formats (templates or worksheets as Sibelius files, PDFs, GarageBand files, etc.)

Because this is music education, their images may contain score excerpts, photos of composers, instruments, and so on. Audio and video may be excerpts from the studied score (made by the student, not copied from commercial recordings of course), but video could be much more – a demonstration of a playing technique, a video analysis, a composition task, a how-to software tutorial. Text strings all of this together.

The Apple ecosphere and the cloud

These media can now be published quickly in a number of ways. As most of those reading this blog know, I’m an Apple Distinguished Educator and have taught in the Apple “ecosphere” for over a decade (while the University of Sydney is not an all Apple campus, the Conservatorium where I now teach is heavily Mac-biased), so I have expertise in products for the Apple platforms, and of course products in the cloud.

Therefore, I know that I can very quickly and easily create an engaging multimedia book with the wonderful iBooks Author simply by dragging and dropping the above media in (proprietary file formats can be linked-to). If I want to aim for a cross-platform audience, my offline tool of choice is currently Hype for publishing interactive Flash-like HTML5 websites, although if I’m keen for an eBook output Pages also does a pretty good job of making multimedia playback (though note: whether all media will playback depends on your eBook reading software). And naturally all of those media could be quickly put together in any number of website-building packages in the cloud (I prefer WordPress, because it powers so many websites online and so is a great tool to model for your students, but you could use something like Wix or Google Sites, or a hip new CMS or LMS like edcanvas or Schoology).

Icing metaphor 1

In other words, I don’t prepare a single solution or a single format, I prepare some engaging resources and publish them in one or more formats that seems to fit. It’s also important that the software that I use to do this, whether in the cloud or on my desktop (i.e. able to be used offline), is really easy to use. Drag n drop easy. Because the power of the resource is in the media, and the presentation is icing.

The Windows solution

Recently, while teaching the end of one course and preparing for another (Technology in Music Education – next semester), it occurred to me that I may be disadvantaging my students who use Windows OS computers, because everything I was teaching them and the models I made for them were made exclusively on my Mac or in the Cloud. They can use the (Mac) lab to get their work done, but if they want to work at home, and their home is in the estimated <8% of Australian homes that don’t have internet access (ABS 2010-11), how can they work offline?

To cut a long story short, I found many solutions for them, but none that came close to iBooks Author, Pages or Hype for making really cool, distributable content in a simple interface. The winner hands-down was Powerpoint, which when exported correctly can include its media and do some pretty app-like stuff (jumping from slide of content to slide of content based on buttons you select, playing media based on choices you make, and so on, just like Hype or Flash). It can only be played on a computer running Powerpoint, however: you can get XPS (a format Powerpoint exports) viewers that maintain clickable links and so on, but Powerpoint seems to drop the audio and video so it’s not a solution in this case.

Of course, this is hardly any less proprietary than iBooks Author’s iBooks format, which can only be read on an iPad and – soon – a Mac, but those programs are free, and when you couple this with the fact that Powerpoint’s media handling is quite limited (I can understand it not supporting Quicktime formats, but surely MP3 and MP4 should be supported out-of-the-box?) it’s just not as robust a solution. The Adobe CS solutions on Windows can do anything and a million times more than the mentioned apps for Mac OSX, but they also have too steep a learning curve for your average school teacher to start throwing resources together in that drag n drop manner.

iBooks Author – free software for Macs, but is there a Windows equivalent to this or something like Tumult Hype?

Now I’m not making a Mac vs PC (or to be more accurate a Mac OS vs Windows) judgment here. To be honest, I’m someone who just loves good tech, and I really really want to find a solution for all of my students. I acknowledge that there may be a lot of software for Windows out there that I don’t know about, but I have spent night after night the last three weeks trawling search engines, online groups and Tweeting back and forth, and have found nothing that fits the simple criteria:

• Free or cheap software
• Drag and drop simplicity; no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or graphic design nomenclature necessary
• Handles all common media types (e.g. jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp4, mp3 – happy to add in wav, avi and mov too)
• Outputs in a non-proprietary or at least free-to-download-a-reader format

I would really welcome a discussion of this topic in the comments below, even if it means lambasting my ignorance of Windows software in education! In fact, if you can provide me with a few titles, this blog was really worth writing.

And that out of the way, excuse me, but I need to thank Apple. No really.

Thank you Apple. No really, I mean it – you listened to teachers and you delivered.

iBooks for iOS – not available for MacOS until now (well, soon).

When Apple launched iBooks Author over a year ago, its reception among educators I knew was a resounding this-is-brilliant-but-please-can-we-open-these-books-on-our-Macs? There was only a thinly veiled subtext if you read or listened to what Apple said about iBooks Author: it was intended to be the clincher for putting iPads rather than other devices in students’ hands. Make it easy for teachers/departments/education boards to make amazing content, and lock it to Apple’s consuming (not consumer, in this case) device.

It made complete sense, but what about schools that had already invested heavily in Apple laptops and desktops? Were they to get rid of these, or were the students supposed to carry iPads and MacBooks in their already-heavy schoolbags? [Actually, we looked at that option at my school at the time, and if we could have made it fly financially, we’d have done it - but we couldn’t.] And if an educational-clincher was needed, there were a few of us who looked at iBooks Author and thought “bugger making stuff for the students, I want to see what they can make for me!”.

And that’s exactly how it has been in my limited experience. iBooks Author is so easy to use and enables such beautiful results that students are engaged and super-motivated. You’re less likely to make a poorly-lit, unscripted music video with terrible audio if it’s going to sit inside a beautiful multimedia book. In this case, the icing is raising the expectations of the filling, because the filling will taste even worse if it’s badly mixed, undercooked and oozing over the plate.

(That was icing metaphor 2)

And Apple listened. Heck maybe it was always part of their strategy, although it didn’t feel like it in 2012. Either way, today they announced that their next version of OSX (“Mavericks”) will include an iBooks reader and it will read iBooks Author-ed books.

Opportunity

The new icon for iBooks for MacOS.

Having been listened-to, or at least perceiving it that way, I can’t resist pointing out what an opportunity for Apple my latest experiences cross-platform are. If Windows doesn’t have a free easy-to-use multimedia publishing app, why not make iBooks Author for Windows? And even if that seems unlikely (and, I know, it does), what about turning this baby around? iBooks‘ main competitor Kindle still has several key advantages over iBooks, which are:

1. If you publish to Kindle or shop from the Kindle store, you can read your Kindle books on practically any device (not just the hardware Kindle), because the Kindle app works on Mac OS X, Windows XP, 7 and 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Windows 8 for tablets, Android, Blackberry and even as a cloud reader (which should keep Linux users happy I guess).
2. In education, the Kindle apps have one killer feature that should be easy for iBooks to include: if you highlight a section, it is copied to your user account on the Amazon website. This saves you copying citations out longhand and saves hours and hours of time even just for high school students writing essays. In iBooks you can highlight sections and you can annotate, but highlighted sections can only be seen within the book (I’m assuming this will be the same in the new version for OSX).

So, we had iBooks for iOS. Now we have iBooks for OSX. Give us iBooks for all the other popular OSes, and in iBooks Author (even if it’s only available for OSX) you have the perfect authoring tool for hundreds of thousand more educational institutions – even some schools running BYOD systems where a tablet or a laptop (rather than a smartphone or iPod) is required.

Apple’s iWork apps will soon work “in the cloud” – right on your web browser, in any OS.

And what would the punchline be? Yep, you got it – today Apple showed they can bring their productivity suite (iWork) to the cloud, so why not bring iBooks and iBooks Author to the cloud too? I think that’s all bases covered.

 

Website updates, SoundCloud integration and a free online Sibelius course. Yes, free.

Long time no blog – but that’s what happens when you take a new job! Since March I’ve been working at the Sydney Conservatorium as a full time lecturer in Music Education. I’m loving it, and I’m exhausted.

My new website at http://www.composerhome.com, designed by Joni-Leigh Doran and coded by yours truly.

This blog post is mostly to draw your attention to the many changes I’ve made at my website, if you only follow my work via my blog. Hopefully some of you have already noticed that my website at www.composerhome.com had a major overhaul in January. Back then the “Concert Music“, “Education Music” and “About” pages were completely re-made, with many new recordings and scores or score samples uploaded. The design was by Joni-Leigh Doran, and I coded every little bit of the site myself in xHTML using some new HTML5 tags and CSS3.

The annoying thing about going with the HTML5 audio tag was that it really isn’t reliable cross-browser. Internet Explorer users, even those up to date, weren’t going to be able to listen, and there were off and on problems on most of the Windows browsers. I spent HOURS on it. All the Mac browsers were fine, although the latest few releases of Firefox have seemed really flaky to me. Anyway, long story short, last week I took all the music to SoundCloud and embedded it from there – for me, this has the benefit of being able to track plays of each track, but also a financial impact of paying SoundCloud for hosting (and it does seem a ridiculous cost when you compare it to something like a Dropbox subscription!: the sooner Dropbox add embed code and play counts to media in the cloud they will be the best online tool for a music educator that there is).

I like the SoundCloud miniplayer, and that’s what you’ll find on the concert music pages, but didn’t realise until it was too late that while the normal SoundCloud player is a nice <iframe> that can call javascript, HTML5 tags or Flash as required, the miniplayer is Flash only. So until I have time to change that, no playback on mobile devices. On the other hand, the education music pages have the nice <iframe> player. Hint if you’d like to do this on your own site – uncheck the image option when you grab the embed code on the SoundCloud website, then edit the height of the embed code to 68px, and you get something a little closer to the miniplayer.

Free course?

OK, so that’s the bit that got to you read this, right? Well, the latest updates on my website are to my Resources pages. I haven’t re-authored some of the units that have been up there for years (although if you haven’t seen the funky HTML5 version of my old When Doves Cry remix unit, you should check it out!), but they’re now nicely organised, and my “lots more” page has got much more information about my academic output than there used to be, including new sections on my research into how composer Malcolm Williamson modified his compositional approach when writing for musically-untrained children. It also lists books and articles I’ve written.

My lovely book/CD/tutorial videos for Sibelius 7

Talking of books and articles I’ve written, I haven’t actually every written a blog about my book “Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials”, a project-based learning course for Sibelius which is the official Avid-endorsed course. Originally, all the resources for this course (Sibelius files, PDFs, other music, audio and video files) and the tutorial videos (some 31 of them!) were supposed to be password-protected, but my publisher never got around to doing that. So I’ve made a new page on my website suggesting that you can actually do much more than just sample the course by using those tutorials and videos: you can actually do much of the course online. And for free! Now, of course, I really actually want you to buy my book, but I have a feeling if you do the course online for nothing, you’ll probably realise that it’s such great quality, you’ll want the book anyway. And it’ll look great on your bookshelves, I promise you. I’ll sign out with a video I made showing how the course works…

 

Adventures in Project Based Learning part 2: back in the classroom

In my last blog I outlined some of what I learned from spending a week observing and even participating a little at High Tech High in San Diego last June. Naturally, the intention of such a big trip was not only to watch and document, but to give this process a go ourselves. And so I came back, co-authored a unit of work, “did the project myself” and then ran it with two year 8 classes.

With mixed results. Which explains why the first blog didn’t get published until now, and why I haven’t exactly rushed to write about this experience either. But then teachers can learn from their mistakes too, right? The other big problem is that we started designing this unit of work while we were still in HTH Chula Vista with three faculties involved: it was only half way through the 5 weeks of work that we realised one of those faculties had dropped out. This greatly affected the success of the project because students were being told one thing, and then another, and ingredients to the final product we had planned were missing.

High Tech High in San Diego

That said, I won’t do finger pointing here for two reasons. Firstly, while we started planning in the US, we did most of the actual preparation very late. So for us teachers there wasn’t a great period of showing what we’d prepared, making the project, and doing proper evaluation between us. We stayed firmly in our silos most of the time, with a Google Doc to share ideas (if you’re interested to read that document, it may make more sense after you’ve read this blog).

All of the HTH teachers would tell you how important preparation and evaluation is, and we proved that: without investing time in confirming and concreting what we were going to do as a group of teachers, one teacher wasn’t properly invested and it all got too hard. Secondly, despite recognising the fault we made at that early point, it’s very tempting to look at the poor work samples from students at the end and blame them on the faculty that didn’t deliver: then Jeff Robin’s blog reminds me that “If you ever say, “I want to collaborate with other teachers but all my partners are bad”, you are the one that is hard to work with.”

I was lucky to be joined in Music by a practicum student, Tim, from the Sydney Conservatorium, and we were working together with Science. The project, originally designed by the head of Science, was simply called What Does It Mean To Be Green? I was pretty excited about this topic and so very eager to be involved. With the recent introduction of the Carbon Tax in Australia it was a great time to ask students to think critically about the information that bombarded them from every side on the topic of “being green”. The government opposition were running a campaign intended to make the Australian taxpayer believe they were going to be much poorer with no environmental gain, so there was political interest as well as scientific.

While the science faculty were busy getting students to think about these kind of things and what their point of view was, my job was to help them ‘sell’ their eventual message, learning key music outcomes in the process. The overall project was to be delivered in a video, so the focus of time in music would be looking at models where sound is used to enforce an environmental or political message, and experimenting with pitched and unpitched sounds, samples and effects in the process. As directed by Jeff Robin, I made the project myself, and then realised that given so little time (only five 50-minute lessons) the models needed to be really clear. Tim also did the project himself, and we shared the teaching and tutoring in the lessons. Tim uniquely had time to attend some of the science classes, and as you’ll see, did some very important work collecting student feedback at the end of the unit.

The first lesson was a guided listening lesson old-school style, with The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by Colin Bright and Amanda Stewart as the model. This work uses mixed media of all the above types, and students could easily identify what kinds of sounds were used to gain what effect. The use of drone and a simple pentatonic scale in the first movement provided starting material for students’ own work, and these became core concepts that the students would learn. Scaffolding was also provided in the school LMS (Schoology), with material such as links to find good sample-able content on the topic:

• 
  http://archive.org/details/AlGoreTestimony
  
• 
  http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/global-warming-climate-change/id391599862
  
• 
  http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html
  – then search within videos for e.g. “Climate”
• 
  http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au
  
• 
  http://www.fin.ucar.edu/ucardil/
  
• 
  http://creativecommons.org
  
• 
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
  
• 
  http://itunes.apple.com/au/course/climate-change/id499099250
  (TED climate change science – cannot be remixed, though)
• 
  http://itunes.apple.com/au/course/climate-change-weighing-evidence/id495060029
  – Open University. All OU resources can be remixed and reused.

The next four weeks were all about improvisation, composition, and learning the technological skills required to complete the task. I broke these skills down in my own project, which then became the second model for students. I created a rough tutorial video for each skill so that students could either prepare flipped-classroom style, or revise/catch up where necessary. Tim created a worksheet showing how to play a number of different pentatonic modes in Garageband. We taught classrooms “from the back” as much as possible, by which I mean that only the first 5 minutes were instruction or reminding students what had to be done, and the rest of the time working with individual students on their actual projects. Here are the four (be forgiving, I said they’re rough!) tutorial videos:

The most positive aspect of the resulting work was that having a self-contained project within music which was then to be expanded into their videos that would be shown at the final POL (presentation of learning, to which their parents and the school principal were invited) meant that I had some assessable work that I wouldn’t have if I had only asked them to produce the final video: more of that in a moment. However, the rate of completion of the unit (.4 failed to submit) was much lower than all other units of work in year 8 (a range of .11 to .14 failed to submit). It is possible to equate the low completion rate with the fact that this was the last unit for the year, most students were not planning to continue music in year 9, and reports had already been written so consequences for not completing work were perceived low.

Before I refer to marks, let me explain that these marks may seem very low, but that I am privileged to work in a department that teaches well above the expectations of the NSW BoS syllabus, and so a mark close to 100% would reflect the ability of students many years in advance of state expectations in music. The two classes (of six total year 8 classes) involved in this unit had only a handful of students who might be expected to gain high marks based on their prior musical education and pretests. The marks that I cite are used only for internal assessment: student feedback shows not these marks but descriptors for outcomes (not evident, developing, satisfactory and high) aligned with BoS outcomes. Nonetheless the marking is entirely consistent and very useful for comparing progress over the year and response to different material and styles of teaching.

Of the assessable outcomes, marks (39% average) were much lower in this unit of work than the two proceeding units (average 54%) for the class which had at the start of the year done better in their pre-test; while marks improved slightly (35% average from a previous 29.5% over the year) for students who had done least well in the pre-test. One could conclude that the students with lower ability were more engaged by the project based learning task.

Non-completion of the task also influences comparison with earlier units of work. Therefore, marks of students who submitted marks in each unit only were also compared across both classes as a whole. When non-completions were not taken into account, students across the two classes showed a slight overall improvement over the two previous units of work, up from a range of 51-58% to 60% in the What Does It Mean To Be Green unit. In addition, some students who had not achieved good marks before did for the first time in this unit. Here is one example:

These results suggest that the PBL unit at the very least maintained their levels of engagement and successfully introduced understanding of new concepts. However it must be noted that these results were gained from marking the music-only task which was designed to be a prototype for the students’ own eventual work. Instead, of the seven films submitted at the POL, only two included any music composed by the students at all, despite notice that students would be assessed on the final music in their videos.

Finally, Tim created a survey in which students were asked to anonymously reflect on the process of a single unit shared between science and art. He shared the results with me, which I’d be happy to share with anyone in full (they’d make this blog a bit long), so here are the highlights:

What motivated you?

Parents and principal being there – 5 (presenting)

Getting a good mark – 7

Keeping up with the group – 2

Having fun

What part of the project did you enjoy the most? Why?

iStop movie – 4

Videoing/filming – 4

The choice of freedom because to everyone “what does it meant o be green” is intepreted differently

Working with two motivated classmates  (in a group) – 2

Presenting and listening to feedback

Working with play dough

What part of the project did you least enjoy? Explain

Writing music – 3

Meeting time limit

Research – 2

Finding time to do our project and working together because in every group there is a person who does not co-operate, but we worked around it

Editing

Filming

iStop movie – took so long

Presenting

Did you feel Music and Science fitted together in a way that helped you learn or produce a better final product?

Yes  – 6

No

Only did Science segment – 5

Would this project have been better or worse if it was just taught in Science? Why/Why not?

No because it gave us the freedom of learning about the part of the project you liked

Worse, there wouldn’t have been that extra push or motivation

Worse – both skills were needed to create a good product

Would have been easier without music

Better if just one subject

Do you prefer working on a project over several weeks or being taught more traditionally toward a test or exam?

Project Method – 6

Traditional Test Method

A combination of both – 2

Please give some feedback or suggestions

Longer period of time, broader time frame

Something I’ve never done before, lots of fun but stressful

The only firm conclusions I can come up with following the experience of teaching this unit was that:

1. Following High Tech High’s procedures for collaborating with other faculties would at the very least increase the chances of creating a successful unit of work. We made time for one 7:30am meeting halfway through the unit, but we really needed that time every week. In the future, this will be supported by the school with structural changes to timetabling.
2. It is very important for students to see the same expectations from all the different staff of different faculties.
3. Some students were more motivated in this unit than previous units and did better work.
4. Projects need to run on a whole-class or whole-year basis where there aren’t some students just in one class and some just in another. Rather than de-streaming classes, faculties can look for similarities in classes and timetabling, or faculties can agree to run projects in every single class in a particular year.

And guess what? Yes, I’m designing the next cross faculty PBL and this time it’s with Maths, the subject that even HTH have found impossible to teach in projects all the time. More on that in a future blog… In the meantime, if you’d like to adapt this unit of work yourself or see how it aligned with BoS outcomes, here it is.

 

Adventures in Project Based Learning part 1: High Tech High

There are a few blogs I’ve been meaning to write over 2012, so as I’m about to hit 2013, I’m going to publish what I have instead of waiting for the time to do a nice polished job. Maybe that time is never coming! So here we go…

——-

In 2012 I was lucky to be involved in a number of key exercises my school undertook in a bid to refresh the schoolwide approach to pedagogy. In June I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate in a field trip to High Tech High in San Diego. This trip was recommended by my friend David Price, founder of Musical Futures and Learning Futures in the UK who has been working with my school this year as we review our practise and look at how we can further innovate learning in the future.

David suggested to us that the model for project based learning wasn’t as well refined anywhere else in the world, and offered to meet us in San Diego to facilitate the trip.

What it ain’t

There’s a lot written about High Tech High (hereafter HTH) on its website, and you can also get a great idea for what their take on project based learning (hereafter PBL) looks like by reading Work That Matters (Patton & Robin 2012) which was jointly produced by Learning Futures and HTH.

However despite the fact I’d done all kinds of reading including the above, I had still made several incorrect assumptions, so I’ll start with those here. Firstly, High Tech High is more than one school. In fact, it’s 10 schools based on the same model. Five high schools, three middle schools, and two elementary (primary) schools. Each one is kept below the 500 student mark because it is believed that that is as many names as a teacher can remember.

And while the schools operate under the same principles (personalisation, adult world connection, common intellectual mission and teacher as designer), the ‘flavour’ of each was distinct. On the one campus the original High Tech High, High Tech High Media Arts and High Tech High International boasted a variety of work and variations on the central model (more on that later), and I also visited the Middle School on the same campus and the Chula Vista K-12 school near the Mexican border.

The next thing that High Tech High ain’t is High Tech. Or rather, I should say that the name implies that everything must revolve around technology, and that there must be cutting edge technology all over the school, and neither implication is true. The ‘tech’ element is that PBL involves a lot of making, and HTH teachers and students absorb the best tech on hand to do that making. Many students carry their own laptops, but in terms of technology on site, your average Sydney independent school would be way in front.

Does this mean HTH falls at the first step? No. It just turns out it has a pretty daggy name – I even heard a few teachers admit as much. That said, the use of mandated technology was interesting. Students were all given a portfolio space, and built their own (very varied) portfolios in HTML, WordPress or a number of other tools. Suprisingly, at Chula Vista all social media and even YouTube was blocked by the proxy server, which seemed an arcanely backward step when so much forward thinking was around you.

It seemed the school didn’t need to worry about names of students next to their work (or at least, you don’t have to dig very far to find it), but then the rules that apply to the rest of the US public education system don’t necessarily apply at HTH.

The Charter School thing

And HTH is able to get away with its own way of doing things, at least to some extent, because it is a charter school. Representing less than 10% of schools in America, charter schools have the freedom to do things their own way but with public funding, as long as they remain accountable to state and federal “standards”, and open to all (NAPCS 2012).

“Oh, the standards.”, Larry Rosenstock, CEO and founder of HT said. “You add a few letters and you have standardisation. I wish they called them “expectations”.

 

Despite the freedom given to charter schools, one could see that even working within these restrictions grated a little with CEO and founder Larry Rosenstock, who we met on our first day at HTH. “Oh, the standards.”, he said. “You add a few letters and you have standardisation. I wish they called them “expectations”.” I liked Larry. He despises everything that is systemically wrong with education worldwide, but has an incredibly optimism for what can be achieved if only people get things right. “The more rules you have the less oxygen you have.”, he told us, referring to the expectations that were placed on students at the HTH schools. “Maybe everybody doesn’t need to go to college.”

But High Tech High students do go to college. And it helps to have statistics like these to rely on: 100 percent of graduates were accepted to college in 2011, with 80% of those being to four-year institutions (High 2012). So the approach works. What was key? Knowing your students: “The key principle is that kids must be integrated”, Larry told us. This means there are no streamed classes, although students can elect to be “honors” or “regular” within any one class, and honors have higher expectations placed on them.

As mentioned, the schools are kept deliberately small, because it’s believed that teachers can remember names of up to 500 or so students, but no more (Californian High Schools often have 3,000 to 4,000 students). Where possible, teachers stick with a class for several years.

“We try to start by assuming good intent in kids”

 

What we would refer to as pastoral care at my school is taken care of in ‘advisory groups’ at HTH. Ben Daley, Chief Academic Officer (who thinks of the US “standards” about as highly as Larry does), told us “We try to start by assuming good intent in kids”. Each teacher is connected to 15 students in an advisory group and a couple of times a year goes to that student’s home to meet with their family and discuss how they are going on their own turf.

“Families love it”, Larry told us. “They make an effort. They’re proud to invite the teacher into their home. Sometimes they make them a meal.” The students at HTH are from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. 8600 students apply for 200 places each year, Larry told us, and they’re chosen by lottery based on postcode, so the chances of getting in if you live in a rich suburb are the same as if you live in a poor one.

Teachers meet at 7:30am every morning for an hour before school starts to discuss how projects are going and flag any issues with individual students. In return for the investment the teachers make in the students, the students invest in school. The maturity they present to visitors and their work was incredible, and a feeling of goodwill and fortune to be there was present in every class I visited. Ben told us “the students interview prospective teachers too. You’d be amazed how seriously they take it – if they hire a poor teacher they really regret it down the track.”

That latter point is less of a problem for High Tech High than Australian schools like mine, though. Their policy is that every teacher is on a one year contract, and all principals review and rate their teachers every year and report up. If a teacher isn’t performing, they can get professional development from the school’s own graduate program, or they can be moved on. There were a lot of young teachers.

What PBL might or might not be

And then there were the institutions. My colleague’s report that Jeff Robin offered him a beer from under his desk during class was legend as soon as it passed his lips on the first day, but when we met with Jeff, self-proclaimed guru of Project Based Learning – the High Tech High way – you could see why everyone is both wary and in awe of him. I liked Jeff and awful lot. Just about everything he said rang a chord with something I believed or taught me something.

He often offered black and white accounts of how things needed to work, wore his principles on his sleeve, but not as a tyrant – as a passionate educator who cares about nothing more than his students’ work. The number one lesson we learnt from Jeff about PBL was the importance of doing the project yourself first. Jeff taught us that every hour it takes him to make a project will be about a day for a class of students. He designs units of work with another teacher from another faculty (Larry told us Visual Arts, Jeff’s subject, has proven better combined with the sciences than maths), and then takes time to do every part of that project himself.

The program of work can then be reverse-engineered; the teacher knowing every step and what skills a student will learn, the outcomes that can be assessed, and so on. But there’s a second benefit: you’ll have designed a project you’re passionate enough about to do yourself, and so you’ll have a great model and energy about teaching it. Models are important to Jeff – he refers the projects to the models he uses and shares then with the students: “Everybody has to have a master”, as he put it. It’s impossible to summarise everything that Jeff taught me here, but he has made a series of videos on his website (Robin 2012) that all of my MTeach students will be watching next year.

The other principle that we saw again and again at HTH was the importance of a showcase at the end of each project. Being there at the end of the school year we were lucky enough to attend poetry readings, exhibitions of medieval machinery, and POLs (Presentations of Learning). The latter are summaries of what a student has achieved over a longer time period, such as the whole year, and are given to two or more teachers and their classmates at once.

Students don’t just list off the projects they completed; they discuss their personal attributes, their strengths, and how they worked on their weaknesses over the year. No wonder they come across so mature. I was lucky enough to be in attendance in a Media Arts POL with my partner teacher Blair Hatch where they were one teacher short. I stepped in, asking students about their work – not to try to catch them out, but genuinely out of interest to find out how they had made artifacts, what their models were, and why.

And we learned more at HTH. I must share with you the process teachers go through to critique each others’ work, the cross-curricular unit of work I created with the HTH framework (yes, I’ve done it myself first), and also the discussions I had with HTH teachers and administrators about music education. That will have to be another blog.

 

Music to Infinity – free education kit

Beginning this week, I’m off on the road with Ensemble Offspring for premiere performances of my Cycles and Circles in addition to a whole host of other contemporary (Australian) pieces including:

Bree van Reyk – Duet with Blindfold

Graham Fitkin – Cusp

John Lely – Distance Learning

Joanna Baillie – On and Off

Matthew Shlomowitz – Hi Hat & Me (AP)

Thierry de Mey – Musique de Tables

Apart from wanting to spruik the concert itself, which will be amazing, I wanted to blog about it because I’ll be presenting a series of education seminars together with Offspring, and for once they’re not in the centre of Sydney but around NSW.

The workshops are fun, 90-minute hands-on sessions where students will do equal amounts of listening, performing, improvising and composing. Each exercise is based around my new piece, Cycles and Circles, in which I’ve explored ideas about phasing and open scoring which is in my background as a composer (my under- and postgrad theses were on the music of Howard Skempton and David Ahern, respectively) even more than music for children.

Howard Skempton by Katie Vandyck
Used with permission

My experience of these kind of activites for children is that they’re very liberating. When you remove the rules of functional harmony, diatonicism and structure and instead place in many ways simpler and more open restrictions like mode, pattern and choice, students are forced to really listen to what’s happening about them and respond. Magic starts to happen.

In Cycles and Circles, the “circles” are repeated patterns which phase with others that are the same or similar, or different. Each pattern itself is plotted to a graph which in turn can be played in one of three modes – the performers can choose which modes they’ll use in advance, or make it up on the spur of the moment. The circles can be played on any percussion instruments, with the range designed to suit classroom Orff xylophones for workshopping. In the premiere performances Claire Edwardes and Bree Van Reyk will play a selection of Chinese bowls (the kind you can buy from a Chinese grocery for a few dollars) and music boxes, programmed with punch-cards.

The Modes

As the circles go through cycles, a third part for (any) bass instruments can choose from different kinds of material, also composed in the three modes. Everything is designed to be performed as softly as possible, so these more flowing or melodic lines rise up from under the tinkling percussion texture. Each element is performable by students in the workshops, but to hear what can really be done with the piece you need to hear Bree and Claire be joined by Jason Noble on bass clarinet.

Students will also compose their own circles using my modes and ones they’ll invent themselves, as well as performing bits of the work.

Education Kit

I’ve created a short education kit with the support of Ensemble Offspring and Campbelltown City Council, and you can download it from the Music to Infinity webpage, here. When you combine all of these resources with the other new Australian works in the programme, perfect for the mandatory Australian topics in stages 5 and 6 of the NSW syllabi, I hope many of you will make a trip out and join me at the workshops!

Details of the workshops are:

Grafton Saturday 15th September 2pm to 3:30pm

Campbelltown Thursday 20th September 10am to 11:30pm and 2pm to 3:30pm (same workshop, twice)

Musswellbrook Saturday 6th October (time to be confirmed – contact the Conservatorium at the address below)

And the concerts:

Grafton Clarence Valley Conservatorium

Saturday 15th September 7:30pm $30/$10 www.promusicagrafton.com.au

Wollongong City Gallery

Friday 21st September 7pm $25/$15 online & $30/$20 on door www.wollcon.com.au

Campbelltown Arts Centre

Saturday 22nd September 8pm $25/$18 www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au

Canberra The Street Theatre

Sunday 23rd September 6pm $25 www.thestreet.org.au

Muswellbrook Upper Hunter Conservatorium $15/$10 www.uhcm.com.au

Saturday 6th October 7:30pm

 

Upcoming performances

I’m usually busy writing about education, technology, or the art of composition – but I rarely get to write about the best bit of composition, which is getting your music performed! Luckily in the next few months I’ve got quite a bit of music being performed, so I thought a quick promotional blog might be in order, in case you feel like you need a bit more Humberstone music in your life. Two of these are world premieres and the other is an opera, so it’s not stuff that gets performed all the time.

The Speaking Piano

An outreach kit for children in primary schools around Goulburn, featuring a printed story book, webapp and even iBook for iPad – culminates in a performance by Michael Kieran Harvey on the 17th August, 7:30pm, Goulburn Regional Conservatorium.

Kiravanu

My children’s opera, and the centrepiece of my PhD, getting its second run-out. This time by students at St Catherine’s Waverley, 11th and 12th September.

Circles and Cycles

This new experimental work will be premiered by Ensemble Offspring on their Music to Infinity tour from the 15th September, which you can read more about here. I’ve also created an education kit and will be presenting some hands-on workshops for music students before some of the concerts – enquire with the venues if you’d like to send your students.

 

 

The Speaking Piano

I’ve just completed my fourth commission of the year, and I’m especially proud of this one. I’m going to blog only briefly on what it’s about, because you can learn everything by going to the website www.composerhome.com/piano anyway, but I thought I might also share a little of the process of making it here, because it has been interesting and inspiring for me.

Background

The Goulburn Regional Conservatorium as illustrated by Little Pink Pebble in “The Speaking Piano”

The Speaking Piano began life as a commission from Paul Scott Williams, director of the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium to write the incredible Michael Kieran Harvey a 25 minute piano piece. When Paul and I sat down to discuss generally what the conservatorium needed (not just in respects to the piece I was going to write), it was coincidentally on the day that Apple released its free iBooks Author, so I was already dreaming up educational books with music embedded in them. Paul described his wish to make better connections to the community of primary schools in and around Goulburn, which he felt the Conservatorium needed to further connect with and support. I’ve worked with Scott Williams for over a decade now, and he is one of the most tireless and passionate advocates of music education of everyone I know, so I wasn’t surprised to hear him espousing such a grand vision only months after taking over the position at Goulburn’s Con.

The story is of two quiet children, Lily and Jack, who learn to communicate through music

Putting these ideas together I immediately started planning in my head a book about music, and music education, written for primary children to enjoy. The book would exist as a traditional printed book, with associated music to learn, but also in a webapp and in an iBooks text book – in each case with the music and voiceover and learning videos built-in.

The story

The story I came up with was about … well, just watch this:

The Process

Detailed job description

Working on a shoestring budget (turns out you can’t rely on Australia Council or NSW Arts funding nowadays, even if you’re a regional con with an education project and one of the best performers in the country booked) I wrote the story and then specified what I needed from the illustrator. If you’d like to see what I wrote in the spec, you can download it here. This part of the process is very important, because if you’re not absolutely clear what you need from a freelance illustrator, you’re likely to waste a lot of time going back and forth and effectively managing their creative work (or simply not getting the quality of work you were aiming for). Look at my outline, and you’ll see it’s extremely detailed, but also gives lots of space for the artist to work within that (I was advised by a friend not to provide my own sketches of what each page should show, and indeed what the eventual artist came up with was much more creative than my ideas).

eLance

I then posted the job to eLance. There are quite a few websites like this nowadays – you post a job, and people from all over the world quote on what they think they can do it for. The quote might be an hourly rate or a total for the whole job. I had to make the quote window quite low, and many artists who I invited (you can go exploring through portfolios there and ask people to quote on your job as well as hoping they will find it) turned it down for this reason.

Of the quotes that I did get I had a shortlist of four that I really liked. I ended up choosing Little Pink Pebble not because of her experience illustrating children’s books (click her name to see her portfolio), but because her watercolours really had the dreamy, beautiful effect that I thought would bring Lily and Jack’s story alive (by the way, I haven’t written about the story, but the names Lily and Jack were chosen by my 4 year old daughter). Especially this one:

A watercolour by Little Pink Pebble

The work process

While I was waiting for the quotes to come in, I had got on with the job of writing the music. By the point I chose Pebble I’d composed over half of it, so she was able to listen to the music and respond to it with her art – and often told me this made her want to do a better job than just delivering the first completed work that she did.

Her first sketches were of Lily and Jack, and she used photos of my youngest children (and ones she found online of Michael Kieran Harvey for “Michael the music teacher”!) to inspire them. She hadn’t been imagining watercolours, but when I mentioned that was why I chose her, she decided to do mixed media, using watercolours for “real life” and digital for daydreams – blurring real life but making dreams become vivid. As the piano begins to speak for the children, these two meet. This is mostly consistent in the book, although it was much slower for Pebble to work in watercolour so a few originally planned to be in the medium ended up being digital.

The first sketches for Lily

First sketches for Jack

Next Pebble did sketches of every page in the book, so I could mock it up as both a webapp and an iPad app using Apple’s iBooks Author. I completed all but one of the compositions, including the music which is not heard in the book, and made the voiceover recordings (the music you hear behind the voice is ‘performed’ by Sibelius). Sibelius First came out over this time period so I was able to export video of the three pieces that Lily and Jack learn and embed them in the digital versions of the project…

Sketch of page 13

There were a number of emails back and forth between Scott Williams and myself as well as between Little Pink Pebble and I, and I introduced the project to Harvey now that there was some material to share. Pebble worked on the original works, and it was wonderful to open the mail box each morning and see what she had been working on overnight (while her time zone in Singapore wasn’t far away from mine, like a typical artist she often worked through the night!). I was able to insert the files into the digital editions to replace the sketches as time went on, and keep everyone up to date.

Finally the book was finished. I made the website/webapp in Hype, which allowed me to do the nice transitions and music and so on. I’m getting a bit better at using that program and with the impending demise of MobileMe and iWeb will probably use it to publish a new website later this year.

The feedback so far has been great (I’d love more in the comments below!), and I’m really looking forward to hearing MKH premiere the collection of piano miniatures at the Goulburn Con in August. Copies of the book and the music are going out to primary schools all around Goulburn as we speak, so the outreach project that I envisaged is really happening. And, because it lives online and is free, it’s really an outreach project to the world! I’m looking forward to doing some more projects like this in 2013…