Meet the Standards

When I sat down to think about an educational technology I use in everyday life, I kept thinking back to our classroom discussion on the technologies we could not live without and what defines technology. I had said during class that I could not live without some device that allowed me to listen to music. It is often convenient for people to listen to music throughout the day using cd players, ipods, computers, radios, or, in the case of my new roommates, a record player. These sources of music are easy to identify as part of what we generally mean by the term technology. They are made by man, facilitate communication, and make life easier. However, the majority of what I really listen to comes from music played with various instruments fond on the front steps and porches of my friends’ homes. I normally distinguish their guitar, drum, or violin playing from my singing in the shower, but it is a little harder for me to grant these instruments the title of “technological advancements.” I don’t remember what we finally decided on as a class, but the definition I like the most for technology goes something like this: “If science is the way we observe the natural world, then technology is how we alter the natural world to solve human problems. I have yet to hear a person create the sounds a sitar can produce with their voice, so to consider this a technological achievement I imagine that at one point a sitar was created to solve the problem that this particular sound someone imagined could not be found anywhere in the natural world.

Music players are not often found or used in typical classrooms. The few times I can remember listening to music during class, the cd or youtube recording was used to play songs that made an idea or set of terms easier to remember, either through humor or repetition. In my foreign language classes teachers used music players a little more frequently to help students practice listening and decoding skills. Technology that allows us to listen to or play music is not often used to help students actually learn difficult concepts, but I think it could be. In biology students may struggle with systems of classification, principles of evolution, or the collaborative efforts of scientists over time. These can each be explored by students using instruments or music players.

For example, students could participate in an activity in which they would have to classify different musical instruments into categories. Through this activity, students would likely run into the same type of problems scientists encounter when classifying living organisms. Different students or groups of students may use different criteria to classify various instruments based on tone, material, genera, size, or method of producing sound. Students could also use this example to start a discussion on why classification is important in the scientific community. (Why distinguish between wood and brass, base and treble, acoustic and electric instruments?)

In another example, a teacher may use instruments to explain the processes which allow evolution to take place in living systems. Students could explore using different materials how people “develop” instruments. One scenario might look something like this:
A student is given a flat, wooden cylinder with one closed end. When asked to play music the student might turn it over and tap on the closed end or tap on any of the sides. When asked to experiment with it they might cover it with a cloth on one end and make a drum. They may accidently break the sides and cover the holes with small metal disks to make a tambourine. Another might fill the hole with beads and close it with a stick to make a maraca or rain stick. If the beads fall out the student may then try to cover the outside with beads instead to make a shakere. The students probably would not know a lot about all of these percussion instruments and their adjustments would be random. Some would make successful instruments, other would fall apart, and others would change from one form to another. This would help emphasize the importance of random mutation in creating new forms. The drum with a whole in the side can no longer be just a drum, it becomes something else. The experiment would also help students to explain why some “species” (instruments) die out or flourish depending on how well suited they are to filling a particular “niche” (how adapted they are to producing a particular sound).

Students could study the collaborative efforts of scientists by drawing comparisons between the histories of musical instruments or styles of music. In science, observations and discoveries contribute to the development of theories about the way things work in nature. Later experiments help to provide evidence supporting or rejecting those theories. The major scientific theories are almost never developed fully by one person at one time. The cultural environments each person makes a discovery in contributes to the interpretation of the results and how well accepted an idea is. In the same way styles of music, such as salsa or hip hop, may be studied in terms of the musicians, diverse cultures, and experimentations that all came together over a period of time to create what we here today. Many people and cultures often contribute to the development of musical instruments. For example the cello originated from an Italian violin in the 1500s, which originated from some still earlier form of instrument.

These activities are not perfect and would have to be adapted in different classrooms to fit students’ interests and needs, but they represent a different way of looking at music players and instruments in the classroom. Instruments and music players can be tools for learning not just technology for the purpose of communicating the same information over a different medium. I think these types of activities would support the principles outlined by the authors of our textbook, Integrating Technology into Teaching. They require students to be actively engaged in the learning process and help students build on the knowledge they have from their own interests and experiences in order to gain knowledge of new concepts and ideas. Hopefully students would learn that most processes and concepts in biology are based in systems that can be compared to other systems in their daily life. Some of the more common examples are, the atmosphere becoming a greenhouse, the nucleus of a cell becoming a human brain, and the mitochondria of a cell becoming a powerplant. Drawing these comparisons to support their learning is a skill that students can use repeatedly in their science studies.