Monday, November 29, 2010

The impacts of technology

This is a great website that talks about the influence of technology on art forms. It talks about how we as dance artists and further enhance our own art of dance through the use of technology and how it has impacted us up to this point in the art form. Interestingly enough, it was written for a senior project by a girl who went to University of North Carolina---so she believes in the fusion as well!

Click here for the PDF file.

Final Project

For my final project, I feel like it would be really useful to learn how to create my own music. Dance teachers are constantly using music, and are even looking for the next great song to use in their classroom--it isn't always easy. It is harder than you think to find fun, appropriate music for a high school dance class...so why not create your own right? I plan on using garageband for this assignment, and perhaps if I had a school that had a lab of Apple computers, they too, could create their own music as an assignment, and then create their own piece of movement to the piece of music they created. Now that's what I call incorporating dance and technology--lets get those students creative juices flowing!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

dance teachers can do technology too!!!!

Here is a great site that gives dance teachers great ideas of how to incorporate technology into their lesson plans. It also gives further links for other sites encouraging the same thing. Click here to find the site.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Internet Safety

This week, I got to read about internet safety for my class and found it really interesting. My post will be divided into two sections: Analyzing the articles I read, and then talking about my discussion with sister and her thought about raising a family in a world that is increasing with internet dangers.

Part 1

It's interesting because there is good and bad to everything in this world. The internet can be a dangerous place, but it can also be a wonderful place to obtain knowledge. I loved reading the LDS talk about the non-member Derik Fitch who searched "mormons" on his search engine and came across what he had been searching for his whole life! I think the church does a great job using the internet as a tool for good influence--particularly with the new lds site, the new mormon.org website. As a future parent, I want to do everything I can to raise righteous children in the gospel. I think some of the majors things I could do as a parent as well as a teacher is to keep the computer in a public place, install spyware the computer, and most of all help the kids understand how important it is to know the dangers of internet safety.

Part 2

I got to talk my oldest sister who has six kids all under the age of 12....crazy!!! She was pretty savvy when it came to internet safety. She has the computer placed in the kitchen where there is high traffic for the family. She says that they have a special safety on the internet FHE every quarter of the year. I talked to her about how she could blog about the church and share her testimony through her blog and she said that she already was doing that....(successful sister). My sister is 34, has six kids, and lives in American Fork. We mostly just spoke about how much she desires to be good mother and raise righteous kids in the gospel, and one of the ways to achieve that was to keep them safe on the internet. It was a great experience--my sister and always have really great, deep, and rich conversations together.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Apple's iPad for teaching???

So, apple came out with a new product a couple of months ago called the iPad. This blog explains how the iPad could actually be a really great tool for teaching kids. Check it out :)

click here for the blog.

My instructional iMOVIE!!!

So I made a movie and am breaking bounds of my discomfort with technology. The video is about the Modern Dance Pioneer, Alwin Nikolais. Check it Out!

Click here for the movie!

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

FREE MUSIC!!!

A lot of the time as a dance teacher, you need to teach movement or create choreography that is in an odd meter i.e. 5/8, 7/8, 13/8, rather than 2/4 or 4/4 time measure. It's really hard to find music that is in an odd meter these days. Everyone seems to compose music in the normal 4/4 time measurement. I came upon a site that specializes in odd meter music and it's all free. Check it out dancers!

Click here for the site