Random access: doing the little things. (Professional Resources).

During the last decade and a half, it has been my pleasure and good fortune to assist a large number of teachers and music schools with their efforts to implement new technologies effectively into their curricula. Recently, as I reflected on many of these experiences, I found myself recalling the implied wisdom of a poem I first encountered in childhood. It goes something like this:

   For want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
   For want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
   For want of a horse, a rider was lost.
   For want of a rider, an army was lost.
   For want of an army, a battle was lost.
   For want of a battle, the war was lost.
   For want of the war, the kingdom was lost.
   All for the want of a horseshoe nail!

Making effective use of technology in one's teaching often involves overcoming one or more significant and obvious hurdles. Many times, though, a school or a teacher will overcome the biggest challenges and still not reach the point where the technology is serving them or their students very well. In these cases, it is a good idea to look for the missing "horseshoe nail."

The Big Battles

The first major hurdle we usually confront is a conceptual hurdle: Have we decided that the adoption of some piece of technology is a good idea?

Getting over the conceptual hurdle may involve doing lots of research into the matter, observing the teaching of others and even setting aside time to take a class on the use of new equipment. These things generally are necessary to convince ourselves we should proceed with the adoption of new technology.

Alternatively, we can make a leap of faith and choose to adopt a new technology-based approach in our teaching. This leap of faith is an act that is not as easy to undertake as it sounds. Nonetheless, some of us take that leap and spare ourselves a significant amount of angst.

The second big hurdle is just as significant and involves the cost issue. The cost of a MIDI instrument, a personal computer or music software is not insignificant. Sure, there are often special deals available to teachers and schools. But even if we take advantage of every academic discount we can find, the costs do add up.

In the case of a school, the solution to the cost issue may involve writing grants or engaging in fundraising, short-changing another line item on the annual budget or soliciting special favors from the administration. In the case of a private teacher, we usually have to take a good hard look at the concept of amortizing the costs over an appropriate period of time, counting the savings that will be realized at tax time, and finding additional fees (such as a lab fee) to charge students.

Once we have overcome these problems, we make our purchases and install our new technologies. At this point, many of us would like to think we have won the war, that our new technology-based acquisitions are now ready to serve us. After all, we have made it through the big battles and triumphed.

Don't I wish this were the case!

Those Pesky Horseshoe Nails

Let me give you some examples of missing horseshoe nails I have found. None of these situations is an isolated incident. I have seen all of these scenarios trip up teachers and music schools numerous times.

Scenario #1

A school finds a way to obtain a number of MIDI keyboards, such as digital pianos or acoustic pianos with MIDI. These instruments have many useful features, including the ability to record and play back MIDI files.

How can these instruments be used? For starters, piano students can use them to record and play back their performances, thereby enabling them to hear themselves objectively. Vocalists and instrumentalists can use them to provide accompaniment if a live accompanist is not available which probably is most of the time.

Given these facts, where should the instruments be located: teaching studios, faculty offices or practice rooms?

In a remarkable number of situations, I have found these instruments located in the teaching studios and faculty offices. Often, faculty members are too busy to learn how to use the instruments or they use them sparingly. Alternatively, if these instruments were placed in practice rooms, they might be used by students nearly every hour the building is open.

Why is student access so limited? The "missing horseshoe nail" may be a result of any of the following:

* There is a concern over possible theft from rooms left open to students.

* The instruments are a loan from a local dealer unwilling to let them be used heavily.

* Teachers have not made enough use of the instrument features to know just how useful they could be to their students.

Are there answers to these problems? Of course, and they are pretty simple. What is missing is the vision and determination to get these tools into students' hands. Scenario #2

A school or studio has invested in an expensive digital piano lab. In addition, personal computers have been added to the keyboards. Large numbers of students use the room to take classes in beginning piano, piano proficiency for nonpiano majors and music theory.

When the room is not being used, it is locked and unavailable for student practice or homework preparation. Why is this? The usual reason is security. There are many potential answers to this problem, including the hiring of work-study students to monitor the room or the installation of an electronic lock system that records the key number of each student using a private key to gain access.

Any sensible solution, though, probably costs money. The cost of the solution should have been factored into the budget when the equipment for the room was purchased. Since this cost was not anticipated, the equipment is vastly underutilized and the students are underserved.

In general, this situation can be rectified with some determination and careful planning. Scenario #3

A private teacher attends an inspiring convention and decides to leap into new technology. So inspired is this person, he or she purchases a MIDI instrument, computer and various software programs all at once. In this scenario, the teacher desires to have all the components of the new setup fully integrated and working in a short period of time.

In the process of assembling all this gear, there is a lot to learn, and, eventually, enthusiasm wanes or the teacher runs out of time. The completion of the studio gets bogged down with the very last step of the installation: connecting the keyboard to the computer.

For an experienced person, this last step is fairly easy. It involves properly connecting a couple of cables, a MIDI adapter and configuring the MIDI software on the computer. In some cases, where an extra tone generator is involved, the procedure does get a little more complicated.

The missing horseshoe nail in this situation is the basic understanding of how these devices work together. While connecting the keyboard to the computer is not as simple as screwing in a light bulb or turning a key in a car ignition, it is a task within everyone's capabilities.

There are several ways to handle or prevent this problem. The first strategy is to purchase just one new piece of gear at a time and allow oneself the opportunity to become familiar with each new piece before adding another one. The advantage of this approach is that you can focus your attention on the features of each piece in a more concentrated way and therefore feel as though you have really mastered each piece before moving on to the next.

The second strategy is to spend some additional time with a set of instructions and simply follow all the steps, even if you don't know the reason for each step. Alternatively, one could seek help from a dealer or equipment manufacturer. I really don't like this approach because it relies on rote learning that may never lead to true understanding.

A third and more preferable strategy is this: Recognize that each technology purchase represents both an economic investment, as well as a mental investment. When buying a piece of technology, you must set aside both an appropriate amount of money to make the purchase and an appropriate amount of time to understand your new device. Scenario #4

A school or private teacher acquires one or more MIDI playback devices to provide vocal and instrumental students with accompaniments when a rehearsal pianist is not available. Unlike the situation in Scenario #1, these instruments actually are made available to the students. Nonetheless, the students make little use of them.

Why? For students to use the instruments, someone must record or acquire MIDI accompaniment files. In either case, a little extra effort is necessary.

Recording straightforward piano accompaniments on a MIDI keyboard is simple. However, one does need to be familiar with how the record and play buttons work. Of course, recording a multi-track accompaniment with instrumental voices is a much more complex task.

Sometimes the recording pianist feels a little self-conscious about being recorded. This is understandable. After all, the student can slow down a MIDI accompaniment (a great reason for using one) and thereby expose all sorts of flaws in the recording. A slightly savvy accompanist, though, should be able to record at a slow, careful tempo and then boost the default tempo of the file after the fact. With just a little additional skill, the accompanist also can edit mistakes on the computer.

Another way to get more accompaniment files is to purchase them or to find appropriate recordings on the Internet. The Internet can be amazingly easy to use and very effective.

If you need to be convinced about how helpful the Internet might be in this situation, try this experiment: Turn on your computer, launch your web browser and go to www.google.com. Google is a website search engine. Type in these words (including the plus signs): bassoon + MIDI + accompaniment. What results did you get?

When I did this, the search engine produced a number of useful websites, the first of which was the MIDI page of the International Double Reed Society, www.idrs.org/midi/midi_hp.htm. This site contains hundreds of MIDI files, many created by college professor Terry Ewell.

The principle behind my search technique was pretty simple: I searched for websites containing all three of these words: bassoon, MIDI and accompaniment. If I had searched for any one or two of these words, the search engine would have turned up a much larger number of websites, most of which would have been irrelevant to the true nature of my inquiry.

It is true that many free MIDI files on the Internet are not of high quality, but many are very good, and I would expect the files on this particular site to be quite useful.

Scenario #5

I have seen this situation on many occasions: A teacher has a classroom heavily endowed with modern technology. The teacher either makes little use of the facilities or, worse, tries unsuccessfully to use some of the equipment on the fly.

This is simply a matter of lack of preparation. Many experienced teachers are accustomed to conducting much of their classes in an impromptu manner, and they make use of older equipment (such as a slide projector, piano or CD player) in a spontaneous manner as needed. Ideally, one should be able to treat a sophisticated MIDI keyboard or music software program in the same way. However, it takes a good bit of practice.

The simplest solution to this problem is spending a little time developing a lesson plan detailing when and how a new piece of equipment will be used. A small amount of planning and practice will go a long way toward making effective use of the resources on hand.

--George F. Litterst, Rehoboth,
Massachusetts
He is a pianist, music educator and
co-developer of the score-following software
program Home Concert 2000.