FIG. 1: Although Apple’s music-technology lesson plans are designed for the company’s GarageBand digital audio sequencer for the Macintosh, all of the concepts can be applied to other music-production software.

One of the challenges in integrating technology into the music curriculum is finding appropriate lesson plans. Most teachers must create their own curriculum materials, and they must often do so from scratch. Fortunately, there is a growing list of online resources that have lesson plans and materials that you can incorporate into your music-technology curriculum.

Several Web sites offer free or very low-cost lesson plans in music technology. When searching for music-technology lesson plans online, I look for articles that have been written by practicing music educators. I also look for lesson plans that have samples of student work and downloadable files, which save me from having to create the files to go with the plan.

The sites I've selected here meet some or all of the criteria for locating quality lesson plans in music technology. A few of these sites have been discussed before in MET, but they are so valuable that it's worth revisiting them.

While not all of the lesson plans will be applicable to your own particular teaching situation, you can peruse the lessons and choose the ones that best fit your curriculum.

www.apple.com
Apple hosts a Web site dedicated to music education that has lesson plans written by music teachers who use the company's GarageBand digital audio sequencer for the Macintosh in their classrooms (see Fig. 1). The lessons specifically reference GarageBand, but their concepts can be applied to other music-production software such as Cakewalk Home Studio, Sony Acid, Propellerhead Reason, and Steinberg Cubase. To get directly to the lesson plans, go to www.apple.com/education/garageband and scroll down to the box called GarageBand Lesson Plans on the right-hand side of the page. Then click on the Lesson Plans link.

The Apple site is organized into elementary, middle, and high-school areas. The lesson plans are in PDF format, and each is organized into Project Overview, Project Steps, Outcomes, Technology Skills, Preparation and Duration, Assessment Suggestions, and Tools and Resources sections.

Most lesson plans have a sample audio file of student work. In some cases, you also get the GarageBand file. You can download the file and begin using it with your students. The following lessons on the Apple site are particularly interesting:

“Funky Fables and Fairy Tales” by Theodore Lai. Using GarageBand or any other multitrack digital audio program, elementary-school students are asked in this lesson plan to record voices of various fairy-tale characters. Students then use signal-processing plug-ins to alter the voice quality for each character. As I started to experiment with this lesson, many extensions came to mind, such as adding loops and instruments to create sound effects to enhance the story.

“Creating Recorder Accompaniments with GarageBand,” by David F. Shaeffer. In this lesson, middle-school music students create their own accompaniments to Beethoven's melody “Ode to Joy.” They use GarageBand sound loops and MIDI tracks, and if they play an instrument, they can record their own digital audio tracks. After completing the accompaniment, students record a track of their recorder performance that is played along with their arrangement. They then burn a CD of their arrangement and performance.

“Poetry, the Music of Our Lives,” by Lesley Higgins Elchuck. In this high-school lesson plan, students create movies that are based on the meaning of poems and are composed of music, narration, and still images. Lessons focus on understanding poems at a deeper level by working in small groups, using Apple GarageBand, iPhoto, and iMovie.

The Apple site does not organize its lesson plans into categories or integrated subject areas; that is left up to you to peruse the lessons that might be appropriate for your needs. Check the site often, because new lesson plans are added periodically.

www.metmagazine.com
Most issues of Music Education Technology run a “Lesson Plan” column, each of which is archived on the magazine's Web site. You can find these articles by clicking on the Lesson Plans link in the left-hand column of the home page.

The list currently has 11 lesson plans that use a variety of technologies. I particularly like Michael Fein's article called “Teaching Song Form” about digital audio and Amy Burns's article called “Teaching Tempo” about teaching time to elementary students (Burns was TI:ME Teacher of the Year for 2004). In the Web Examples section of the MET Web site, you can find audio and data files that can be used in the lessons. Since MET is published four times per year, you can count on new lessons to be added continually to the site.

www.berkleeshares.com
The Berklee College of Music has a wide range of online courses as well as a dedicated Berklee Shares.com Web site that has free, well-written lesson plans and tutorials. The left navigation bar (see Fig. 2) has several sections, some of which apply directly to music technology. In the Production and Technology section are lessons on Pro Tools, mixing, and MIDI sequencing. Upon opening the PDF files, I was amazed to find extremely detailed and easy-to-use tutorials.

FIG. 2: The Berklee College of Music’s Berklee Shares.com site delivers many free, well-written lesson plans and detailed tutorials excerpted from the school’s online courses.

The Songwriting and Arranging section gives you materials that should be helpful to secondary-level students who are composing and arranging music using technology. “Basic Melody in Songwriting” and “Basic Lyrical Elements” are examples of the helpful tutorials in this section.

The Browse Lessons by Instrument tab has six lessons for DJs and turntables. If you teach in a guitar- or keyboard lab, check out the offerings in those sections. The “Basic Hard Rock Keyboard” and “Playing a Chord on Keyboard” lessons are very well done and were superb additions to our secondary-school keyboard lab.

The downside to the Berklee Shares Web site is that materials are not organized into a specific sequence or curriculum. Rather, they are a selection of excerpts from their complete online courses. The materials can be used on their own in a variety of lesson applications. Berklee encourages people to take their online courses for more in-depth information, and the courses are a good option. But you will find a lot of excellent — and free — materials on the Berklee Shares site.

www.soundtree.com
SoundTree is a division of Korg USA that offers music-technology products and services to schools and churches. Its Web site has an impressive number of lesson plans in various areas and topics. Every lesson plan has complete instructions and related files. In many cases, the files can be downloaded and used in the classroom, saving you time and effort.

FIG. 3: Jim Frankel’s “Sakura” lesson plan is an excellent example of the materials available on SoundTree’s site. If the overview sounds promising for your purposes, click on the View Lesson link to get a PDF of the lesson plan.

To get to the current list of lesson plans, go to SoundTree's home page, click on the Teaching Resources tab, and then on Lessons and Projects.

The categories include All, Elementary, Middle School, High School, and College. There are currently 28 lessons and projects on the site. After selecting a lesson (for example, “Sakura,” by Jim Frankel), you get an overview of the lesson objectives, the National Standards that are addressed, the required materials, and the grade level the lesson is aimed at (see Fig. 3). If you like what you see, click on the View Lesson link to get a PDF of the lesson plan. Frankel's “Sakura” lesson has a comprehensive and easy-to-understand list of procedures and extensions and the music notation needed for the lesson. He provides links to Web sites to learn more about “Sakura,” and you can click on a MIDI file sample for reference.

Another excellent lesson on the SoundTree site is Ace Martin's “Commercial Projects in the Electronic Music Lab.” In this lesson, high-school students prepare three types of commercials: a public-service announcement on the subject of their own choice, such as environment or health; a rearrangement for a current commercial product; and finally, a commercial for a new product.

The SoundTree lessons are not designed to be a complete curriculum; rather, they are exemplary lessons contributed by teachers who are working successfully with students in music technology. All of these lessons can be used in different classroom settings. Check back frequently, because new lessons are added every month.

www.ti-me.org
The Technology Institute For Music Educators (TI:ME) Web site has the largest number of music-technology lesson plans of the sites mentioned here. It has only one drawback: you must be a member of TI:ME to access most of the lessons. One downside of the TI:ME lessons is that most don't have reference files, such as samples of student work or the data files needed to complete the lesson. It does supply, however, complete and consistent lesson plans that include level, equipment, duration, prior knowledge and skills, MENC national standards addressed, materials, objectives, procedures, evaluation, follow-up, items to purchase, and when the budget should be submitted. Three sample lesson plans are available to non-TI:ME members in the Free Tour section of the Web site.

The Lesson Plans section is located in the Members Only section, and you must be a member of TI:ME to be able to access it. Information about TI:ME and its membership benefits can be reviewed in the Free Tour section.

There are currently hundreds of lesson plans posted on the site, all written by music educators. Teachers from throughout the county who attended summer technology workshops contributed the majority of these lessons. The advantage to the TI:ME site is that you can search lessons either by grade level, by MENC standard, or by technology area.

To get to the free sample lessons, go to the Free Tour section and click on the Lesson Plans you want to check out. Scott Watson's lesson plan about teaching instrumental ear training is most interesting. He instructs you to create notation files and hide notes or measures in a familiar melody. Students are then challenged to play the melody on an instrument and fill in the missing notes or measures by ear.

In addition to downloading technology-related lessons, TI:ME members can post lesson plans to the site. There is a handy automated lesson plan form on the site that makes posting lesson plans a snap.

www.musictechteacher.com
Karen Garrett, TI:ME 2005 Teacher of the Year, is a third-grade teacher who shares many of her technology lesson plans on her Web site (see Fig. 4). Garrett's lessons teach students to create compositions using notation software and their keyboard skills. To get to the lessons, go to the main site and click on Lessons or go directly to www.musictechteacher.com/lessons001.htm.

FIG. 4: TI:ME 2005 Teacher of the Year Karen Garrett’s comprehensive lesson plans are wonderful for teaching third graders to create compositions using notation software and keyboard skills.

The “Form ABA” lesson offers suggestions and links to previous lessons to reinforce concepts needed to complete the lesson. The interactive lesson-plan format includes questions to ask the students, notation and sound files to play for the class, and extra activities and evaluation. They are comprehensive lessons that can easily be followed and referenced. Another of my favorites on this site is called “Copyright Lessons.” The plan includes questions to ask and follow-up Web sites. Students are encouraged to copyright their own compositions.

An added bonus is the Student Work and Compositions section, where teachers can listen to third-grade student compositions. There are currently 16 entries. If you teach at the elementary level, this site will be a wonderful resource for you. It has received numerous awards.

www.vtmidi.org
The Vermont MIDI Project site is one of the most popular music-composition sites on the Web. The site has information on how it teams students up with composers, and visitors can read about the process and view sample student projects. In addition, the site has some excellent lesson plans about music composition (see Fig. 5). To find them from the home page, click on the Resources and Publications tab, and then choose Composition Resources: Approach to Composition. Alternatively, go directly to www.vtmidi.org/AtoC.html.

FIG. 5: The Vermont MIDI Project site explains how the project teams up students with composers, offers sample student projects, and presents excellent music-composition lesson plans.

I was especially interested in “Melodic Construction and Introduction to Notation Software” by Carolyn Keck. The complete lesson plan is provided in PDF format. The lesson plan has sections on standards addressed, prior experiences and knowledge, procedure, critique, development, assessment, and extension. There is a composition example elsewhere on the site. Students are instructed to create their initial compositions on staff paper, and then copy them into notation software.

Other fine lessons on the site are “Motif and Rhythmic Accompaniment” by Keck and “Adding Tonic-Dominant Harmony to Original Mi-Re-Do Melody” by Betsy Greene. Greene's “Create a Melody: ‘Use These Words’” lesson plan has a sample student file and a composing rubric that can be used to evaluate student compositions.

In addition to excellent lesson plans, the Vermont MIDI site contains many examples of student compositions. You can click on the Student Composition link on the Web site, listen to each student's composition, and read their descriptions of the compositions. Many times students' descriptions list the steps they were assigned by their teacher. I have gotten many excellent ideas from these examples.

For more about this outstanding program, see the feature story “Spotlight: The Vermont MIDI Project” in the February/March 2005 issue of MET. You can download the story for free from the MET Web archives.

I learned about most of the sites featured in this article by word-of-mouth or by searching the Web. I generally searched for the name of a specific music-technology term and the words “lesson plan” in quotes. With Google, for example, I entered: electronic instruments “lesson plan”. Another approach to searching for lessons is to enter the name of a specific software program, such as GarageBand or Cakewalk Home Studio and the words lesson plan.

The sites listed in this article are a good starting place to build your music-technology curriculum. Using classroom-tested lessons is an excellent way to start. Also consider submitting your own lesson plans to sites such as TI:ME and SoundTree so that others can learn from your experience.

Tom Rudolph (terudolph@aol.com) is the director of music and a middle-school classroom and instrumental-music instructor for the school district of Haverford Township in Havertown, Pennsylvania. He is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of the Arts and president of the Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME).