Music Teachers Blog

A student in a class of mine inadvertently pushed me to discover one of my most useful teaching tools: a digital dictation machine, for recording music. I’ll tell you how I’ve come to use it for teaching, and also some teaching uses for it that I haven’t tapped into yet myself.

What happened in my class was that this particular student digitally recorded music I played while demonstrating during class, and then, knowing that some of the other students had not taped anything in class, he would help them out by emailing them copies of my playing.

He was considerate enough to send copies of his emails to me, and this is how I realized that there were several problems with this scenario. First, the recordings weren’t exactly the samples I would choose to send to my students. Second, when emailing the recordings, my student added text comments of his own which did not always highlight what I thought was important, or sometimes even misinterpreted what I had said in class.

The third concern is much more indirect, and reasonable people can differ about this one: there was no attribution in the recordings. In this digital age, we all deal with the fact that once information is out there on emails, it can go anywhere, forever. (This concern is not limited to digital information, of course. Not long ago, a student came to me asking if I’d ever heard the music on a sheet he showed me. I took a look, and lo and behold, the music was in my own handwriting! It had made the rounds without attribution over the course of a decade.)

A New Offering to Students

My answer to the situation in my class was to offer recordings myself, with samples played the way I wanted them, and accompanied by appropriate text where necessary.

To do this, I had to find a convenient way to make the recordings, and came upon an amazing digital recorder made by Olympus (the WS-100 is the one I use). There are probably other good ones out there, but this one is about the size of a small cellphone, has a speaker and microphone, records over 25 hours of material, seems to run forever on a single AAA battery, and best of all, you can just pull it apart and plug it right into the USB port of a computer, like a flash drive.

Once you plug it in, it acts as a removable drive on the computer, and you can just drag music files directly from the gadget to a folder in your computer–or attach a music file right to an email. It uses Windows Media files, which work in both PC and Macs, and are very efficient. They don’t take up much space when attaching them to an email. By the way, I always mention my name and the year at the end of the recordings; I’m curious whether I’ll run into them again somewhere, somehow, on the internet, in ten or twenty years!

After making these recordings, I can save them in my own computer’s folders and compile a nice library of recordings which I can later send as needed to other students when I work with them on the same music.

Documenting Student Progress with Audio

Another use for the recorder is to record students at various points of their progress and store the files for reference. These can serve as concrete evidence of your students’ progress, and the results of your teaching. You can refer to these recordings yourself, and even play them for, or email them to, students at the end of the term, or a year or more later. What a treat it could be for a student who’s feeling a little down about his or her progress, when you play a little recording of them from a year ago!

This recorder can also serve as a traditional dictation machine to help keep track of students, as discussed by A. Gould in the posting of October 20, below.

If you have tried similar devices or methods, or have suggestions for other ways to use it, I’d love to hear from you, and I’m sure others would as well–just add a comment below.

Posted in Teaching Tips, Music & Technology |