Marie Bonello
is a vocal music teacher at Beck Centennial 
Elementary School in
Utica, Michigan

MARIE BONELLO

ne of the most exciting parts of a fourth grade music curriculum can be the trip to hear an orchestra performance. Much preparation by the music teacher is needed, including familiarizing the students with the orchestral instruments, the composers specific to that concert, and substantial listening to the musical selections. The use of multimedia software allows the teacher to create a "package" of visual and aural information which the students can explore on a CD-ROM.

In the Utica Community Schools, all of the fourth-grade students attend an orchestra concert. In the past, students learned about orchestral instruments and music they would hear at the concert through listening lessons, musical examples, pictures of instruments and composers, and facts about composers presented in a teacher-led setting. By utilizing multimedia authoring software, students can experience the orchestra in an independent and student-led setting which allows the student to spend as much or as little time on a certain instrument, musical selection, or composer as they need. They can "test" themselves on the instruments, music and composers within the software presentation.

This hypermedia software is made up of six files, or "stacks:" Music, Composers, Instruments (three stacks) and Test Yourself. There is a Home stack which gives the user a menu to the four areas mentioned above. There are links between composer, instrument and music cards only when the user is invited to learn about an instrument invented by a composer. 

ach stack explores a different subject area. The Music stack allows the user to listen to themes from music they will hear at the concert. It also contains text about the piece of music, including who wrote it and why. The Composers stack has pictures of most of the composers, many gleaned from the Internet. There is also historical information about each composer. The Instruments stacks classify each instrument by family. A family is represented in graphics on a single card, but each instrument can be accessed on individual cards. Each card has a graphic of the instrument, text information, and an audio example of the instrument. Test Yourself is a stack consisting of sixteen cards with multiple choice questions. The questions are aural and visual identification of instruments and music, and recall questions about composers. The user stays on that card if an incorrect answer is selected. A correct answer will show them the next card in the test.

The initial creation of this software can be time-consuming, but each successive year only a few changes regarding specific musical selections and composers need to be made. The instruments stacks, which are the largest and most time-consuming, can stay the same. 

The Utica Community Schools is a large district containing twenty-seven elementary schools. In order to get the software to the research center teachers, music teachers and fourth-grade classroom teachers in a format which will allow for virtually no installation, the software was put onto CD-ROMs. This can be costly when each school is receiving approximately twenty-five discs! Although the district owns a CD-ROM burner, the time to burn the software onto each disc would be far greater than the time it takes to create the software itself! Each disc would take approximately three hours to burn, not including the time to create the master CD-ROM. By finding a company which specializes in creating discs for businesses, the cost can be $1 per disc. Creating the master disc, which would be burned from a Zip cartridge, is a one-time  expense: approximately $400. Businesses usually offer volume "discounts," which can bring both the master disc and CD-ROM prices down.

n searching for ways to cover the costs for this type of endeavor, one should seriously consider grants. School districts may offer arts grants, and there are  technology grants available to educators. One such technology grant is the (Michigan) Governor's NextDay Teacher Innovation Grant . It awards funds to teachers who do something new with existing technology. In this case, HyperStudio was the existing technology while the orchestral learning software was the innovation. Other such grants are beginning to surface as the government and education communities recognize the importance of technology as a tool to aid student learning.

The classroom teachers and research center teachers must be made aware of their role in the project. We realize that all teachers are busy with their own curriculum and are not necessarily receptive when something else comes their way. By giving them lesson plans and ideas on how to integrate the orchestra software into their curriculum these teachers may even be eager to use the discs with their students. For example, research center teachers can have students create their own project about a composer or an instrument using multimedia software. The classroom teachers can focus their social studies curriculum around a certain composer's country and teach the science of sound and pitch as related to instrument size. There are many possibilities for integrating the software into the fourth grade curriculum, and teachers may create their own ways to correlate with the orchestra concert. The first time this software was used in the Utica Community Schools some teachers even found ways to use it through the end of the school year!

Music teachers can find ways to integrate technology into their curriculum to help them present perennial concepts in new ways. Multimedia software can be used by the teacher to create software which students can explore on their own. Students who are familiar with the multimedia software can create their own projects based on composers, instruments or music from the orchestra concert. Using multimedia software can prepare the students for an orchestra concert while enhancing other curricular areas.