Professional Development Showcase

My Professional Development Showcase highlights select projects and assignments which I am most proud of. Michigan State's Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) curriculum covers a broad range of theoretical and applicable topics for music educators. These assignments are grouped under three categories, The Maker Movement, Blended Learning, and Serious Games. Professionals from all backgrounds enroll in the MAET program; creating a wonderful learning community filled with a diversity of perspectives and specialties in each class. I was able to relate each project to my music content specialty and develop pedagogical solutions to the unique challenges my students face. Many of the projects seen below were directly inspired by classroom challenges I faced while completing the program.

The Maker Movement

The Maker Movement lends itself well to music education. The emphasis on creativity and communally sharing artifacts of creation naturally blends with student's innate desire to compose and collaborate. Recording technology has become so affordable and easy to use that virtually anyone can setup a microphone and capture music they make. Plenty of platforms exist which allow music makers to easily share their work with a wide audience.

Link: create.piktochart.com/output/18454288-making-in-general-music

This info-graph provides a basic

overview of the maker movement.

On the info-graph I provided

three characteristics of making

defined by Erica Halverson and

Kimberly Sheridan in their

Harvard Educational Review article.

Also included are 9 principles of

Maker Education listed by Mark

Hatch in his Maker’s Manifesto.

I was also able to incorporate

compositions that my

scholars have made and shared to

soundcloud.com via hyperlink.

By blending information with

my student's examples I show

understanding of the Maker

Movement and showcase the

movement working through my classroom.

Photo couresty of: Illinois.edu

#Making - Solo Cup Speakers

A maker lesson you can try out in your classroom is having students make Solo Cup Speakers! My students rarely have access to quality speakers for music listening and often make do with just the tiny speakers in their phones.

Students can amplify the volume of a tiny speaker, like the one in the Little Bits Synth Kit, by creating a Solo Cup Speaker.

Maker lessons are all about hands on activities. Students explore, play, create, and share. This lesson showcases my ability to take a new technology and translate it into a hands on solution relevant to real life problems my students face.

Blended Learning

In order to drive engagement I have developed a technology rich classroom environment where students simultaneously build competency in music and technology. The Google Classroom Virtual Walk-through will take you on a tour of my Google Classroom. You can preview part of a composition project to get a better feel for how a blended learning lesson feels in my classroom. Finally, I would like to invite you to browse through a Google Classroom learning module to see the bigger picture.

Google Classroom - Solution to a

"Wicked Problem"

I use the Learning Management System (LMS) Google Classroom to organize my assignments, support instruction, and provide feedback to my students. A Wicked Problem think tank I participated in highlighted this type of technological integration to be one of the most effective tools for educators seeking to improve educational outcomes and reinvent teaching. This artifact showcases my willingness and ability to research and integrate solutions in my teaching practice.

This lesson from my Google Classroom Music Recording module had scholars record an improvisation to "Lean On" by DJ Snake.

Blended Learning - Remix

Learn - Lean on Remix Instructional Video.mp4

This video is part of a blended learning lesson where students learn how to play the original melody to a section of a remix, explore the song by improvising over the learned melody, create an original recording of their improvisations, and share their work with the class.

Each component of the lesson is augmented with an instructional video I created and delivered through Google Classroom.

The lesson also follows the main ideas of the maker movement by getting students hands on creating and sharing.

Blended Learning - A Semester of Music Recording

You can see Blended Learning in action by checking out my Google Classroom music recording module. Sign into the sample student gmail account detailed below then go to Google Classroom.

Username: Samplestudent@ucvare.org

Password: Samplestudent

Serious Games

My life long passion for gaming started when I was in Kindergarten. A brand new cartoon series called Pokemon came to the United States from Japan and I learned how to read by playing the cartoon's game on a Gameboy Color. This early experience impacts my teaching even today. I know from first hand experience that kids learn through play and educational gaming can be a powerful motivator in the classroom.

Candyland Keyboarding was my very first foray into serious game development.

I decided to alter the mechanics of the classic children's game Candyland.

Through my game alterations students could practice note identification on a piano's keyboard.

Candyland Keyboarding - Play with a Serious Purpose

Nathan Kleinschuster Game Lab 1 Candyland Keyboarding

Teachers often have to re-purpose and adapt non-educational tools or materials to work in the classroom setting to fit within curriculum or budgetary requirements. This activity pushed me to work within the confines of an existing game system and creatively mold Candyland's game play to a serious and educational purpose.

Spell - A Serious Game

I later expanded on my Candyland Keyboarding project and created a music theory card game which challenges players to spell chords and name intervals. I even created a video to pitch the game to a principal who may be wary of including games in the school curriculum. I am able to develop customized games to meet my student's learning goals and advocate for the non-traditional teaching tools which I know allow my students to flourish.

Learning Quest 2 Presentation "Deck"

Spell - Serious Research

Epic Quest 3 Pitch final movie.mov

Administrators often need convincing when it comes to educational games in schools. I created this video to help sway the opinion of my building's principal to allow me to use the game I created for my classroom.

People are often surprised by the amount of research and prior knowledge needed to create a serious game. While developing Spell I consolidated all of the research I did onto one Google Doc. While not epic in scope, research like this grounds my practice in theory and arms me with the data necessary for justifying the inclusion of serious gaming in my classroom.

Cards for Community - A Serious Game

A large part of serious game development involves researching and understanding the users of your product. Using theories of user interaction I began developing a restorative game to be played by students in detention. Below are artifacts of the user interaction process I followed to bring a serious game founded in the theories of restorative practices to life.

Cards for Community - Research and Design Brief

Design Brief 841 Microlab

To initiate the design process I completed preliminary research and set design parameters such as audience and platform. Although the game mechanics altered through various iterations this design brief acted as a "light house" anchoring all design choices around established priorities.

The preliminary research turned up the 5 restorative questions above.

These question eventually became central tenets of gameplay.

To assist in the development of my restorative game

I conducted ethnographic user research to better understand how player's initial emotional states

effect their experience during and after game play.

Cards for Community - Ethnographic User Research

Ethnographic user research

I had never seen ethnographic research before working with user theory. In pedagogy courses we often look at massive well-funded research studies led by a team of professional scholars. User interaction departments rarely have the resources or manpower to execute research on this scale and instead rely on ethnographic research methods which can be completed by a single researcher for free; or the price of a night at the arcade for my research study. I've found that this form of research is perfect for teachers developing content for their own classroom.

Cards for Community - Playtesting Presentation

Playtest Presentation MI 841

By utilizing various user research methods I developed a user-centered game prototype and play tested it. Play testing data was collected and compiled into the presentation embedded above. Presentations like this are often used to report progress back to development teams or as milestone markers for investors. Education increasingly involves the reflection and reiteration of classroom projects to more closely mirror real-world business environments. I find it important to show my students that even their teacher's work is not perfect. There is always room for improvement. Elements of the Maker Movement can be found in this presentation as the act of communicating and sharing the results of this project were as equally important as gathering the data in the first place.

Report abuse