Music and Online Teaching Tools

Last semester in my practicum course, one of the assignments involved us choosing to create an activity in an online tool. I believe that we had three options, but if anyone did the third, I don't remember. In fact, I don't remember what it was if there was a third option. Most, if not everyone, used  or

Earlier we did an assignment using , which is a great tool, but that was relatively easy, so it wasn't an option for this assignment. Still, easy was popular, and most people chose PlayPosit. I didn't, though. Perhaps it didn't look as easy to me, or I didn't have any video in mind to use. I made a weather activity in H5P. A lot of people were surprised because they had thought H5P was much harder. There were some tricks to it, I agree, and it did take , but it was kind of fun. I like looking for images more than videos, maybe? I had to work with pictures a lot when I worked at , helping teachers to find copyright-free images and/or helping them to get permission, but we generally tried to use the free ones. Fortunately, Creative Commons  was getting started and making some headway at that time, so that made it a lot easier to find them. But I'm getting sidetracked again.

In any case, since everyone had seemed to think PlayPosit was so fun and easy, I thought I'd try using it for the listening assignment option for my Materials Creation class. With all the talk about  in that class session, and having heard before that some of my peers use music at the beginning of their class, before it starts, I started doing it earlier in the semester--just did it a few times. And then when everything went online, so went all the routines. ,,,

until!... I started just getting tired and having a harder time making conversation with the early  as we waited for everyone else. I'm just tired of talking about , I think, and it was hard to remove my  from it in conversation. So I remembered to bring back up the !

First I played "Je te donne" by  because, well, that was the favorite song my high school French teacher played for us. And then I took up a peer's suggestion and told my students they could suggest songs. Only one student did, but I'm glad he did. But now I'm still trying to think of ways to bring in more music. 

Part of the problem is that I'm very sensitive when it comes to music. Part of this is my spiritual sensitivity. Materials that promote beliefs or actions that aren't congruent with my beliefs tend to make me a bit . This includes, of course, the common morality concerns--drugs, swearing and extramarital affair promotion, but it also things that promote negative/distorted thinking and selfishness. I could go on with a long story about my past and how I learned the reasons for my depression rather than developing the depression because of my beliefs, but that's not really what I wanted to address here. The fact remains that are is good and bad music and sometimes the bad music might seem harmless when it's not. In any case, I don't want to promote selfishness or distorted thinking. Who does?

So back to coming up with music for students and what to do for a listening exercise for my class. I started thinking through the French music I do have, rather than randomly searching on --I don't know that that would be very effective, and after praying about it, it came to me. Nana Mouskouri!. My French aunt introduced me to her over ten years ago when I went to visit my family in Alberta one Christmas before my grandparents passed away. She gave me  and I just loved it. Unfortunately, with time and overplaying, the discs became corrupted, and though I'd loaded them onto my computer, that computer's fan broke, and, well, to make a long story short, I lost them. And I thought I'd lost them for good, until my brain went back to YouTube. Duh. See, I just don't think like the younger generation in some ways. But indeed, my favorite song was on YouTube. And it promotes happiness. , ! Win, win, win!

I honestly have no idea if my students will like it. It is a bit dated--older than me, though not by much. But it is older than me, and it's still catchy, and so I think it has potential for younger generations. In fact, as I was writing this looking for links and pictures, I found another version by Lara Fabian, from 2009, so a lot more recent!

However, the exercise I ended up making won't work for my current students because it has to do with the future tense, which we don't study in 101. Nonetheless, I can still play it for them during the waiting period before class so there's another win!

Now back to PlayPosit. Considering its popularity among my classmates last semester, I did still find it had its challenges. The first run through, the questions were all popping up before the targeted segment, which was obviously not going to work, but I couldn't figure out how to move them, so I deleted them all and started over. I since figured out how to move questions, but it's not easy to notice all of the ins and outs. In fact, even as I've been writing this, which is after I submitted the assignment, I've been thinking of different things and finding new tricks and options in the tool. So that's good because it does have a lot of capabilities. But I changed a few things so the assignment isn't up-to-date. Maybe I'll wait until closer to the due date to resubmit though. This semester, I've had this bad habit of resubmitting just about everything because I think of different things later. This is why it's good to do your homework early, n'est ce pas?

Bon bin, Voila.