Thomas J. West Music

As I continue to get further into using technology as a part of my life, I find that my generation is the oldest generation that has had electronics as part of their life pretty much since we were little kids. I was playing my first games of pong and Atari Combat when I was in first grade, my elementary school had their first computers (Radio Shack TRS 80's) when I was in 5th grade, and the first networked instant messaging I was exposed to was my VM mainframe account at Penn State. I've had a personal website in one form or another since 1998. The first computer in my home was a PC Junior before Windows when everything ran on DOS. I can still write simple programs using BASIC and I can navigate directories (what everyone calls folders now) using DOS commands.

I am in the final months of my third year teaching for the performing arts center attached to a K-12 cyber school. This, along with the networking I've done to promote my website has thrust me to the cutting edge of the educational uses of technology. Suprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), as I sat in training sessions to use Moodle, I felt that I was one of the most qualified people in the room to use this new technology. I found myself very quickly in a leadership position to help the Performing Arts Center integrate technology into their course offerings.

And now, I take my next big step into web 2.0 - over the weekend, I got my first smart phone: an LG Ally droid phone.

How A Smart Phone Saved My Wrists

In July of 2010, I made a commitment to write a new article for my website on a daily basis. Since then, I have been typing on the keyboard, playing violin and piano daily, and in general using my fingers and wrists more now than I ever have. The result is that I began to develop repetitive strain injuries in my left wrist. I bought an ergonomic keyboard to help with the strain, but now with my smartphone, I can dictate blog posts directly into Evernote using the flexT9 app from Nuance, the creators of the excellent Dragon voice recognition software. I dictated this entire blog post while walking to my school this morning. Once I got to school, I copied and pasted the article into my blog and edited the minor errors.

There is no question that my productivity has gone up immensely. There is also no question that dictating these blog posts is going to save my rest from further damage.

How Public Education is Playing Catch-Up

Back in 2004, I did a long-term substitute teaching job at a progressive school district in the Philadelphia area. During our in-service presentations that fall, we were showed how fast technology is progressing with demonstrations from Microsoft and Apple on innovations that were up-and-coming. The general message was, "Kids already use this stuff, and companies are looking for people who use it. You need to get on board!" This presentation seemed to have fallen on deaf ears, but now I understand that teachers simply don't know how to incorporate technology into what they already do. Now, six years later, we are only beginning to incorporate technology into the classroom in ways that are effective and meaningful for students. It's been a slow waking up process for everyone in public education, and even administrators didn't know how to help teachers to move forward with this technology.

In the past three years, I have found myself catapulted to the forefront of this movement. I got here partially because of a lifelong love for technology, but I also got here because of the nature of the school that I work for. I also got here because I got online and started networking with other teachers who were doing the same things I was doing. My peers have literally taught me 90% of the things that I now use in my classroom. I originally opened a Twitter account to promote articles from my website. Little did I know that Twitter was going to revolutionize my professional development in ways I never expected. The music ed chats every Monday night on Twitter, combined with the Music Professional Learning Network have been indispensable sources of innovation and creativity for me and everyone involved with them.

There are definitely some Web 2.0 pioneers in music education who are paving the way for everyone else to get on board and start using this fantastic technology. I am pleased to consider myself amongst those that are doing these things, and I encourage everyone to get on board and start incorporating technology into what you do. Your students already use it, so you need to find a way to make it work for you as well.

P.S. I love my smartphone!

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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