Using Music.....

Incorporating music into teaching has many benefits. These benefits include:
• Adding entertainment and enhancing other teaching media (e.g., photo and video presentations, background sound effects to oral presentations and web pages).
• Helping to create interest in classroom tasks (motivation).
• Assisting audio/visual learners.
• The ability for music to be adapted to work with any classroom topic (e.g., adding sound effects to storytelling in a literacy class or adding music to a cooking demonstration video made by a student).

An important consideration when using music from the web is to keep in mind music copyright laws. In brief, copyright is a form of legal protection for the use of written material. For further information on copyright laws use this link (copyright laws).

I myself have made and edited a few travel videos over the years. I have found that by adding background music or sound effects to visual clips it enhanced and helped set the mood of the story being told.

Choosing and incorporating music into web based classroom tasks is fun! When students find tasks interesting they are more likely to be motivated to complete the task (Mclnerney& Mclnerney, 2006).

Due to different learning styles and abilities amongst students there needs to be an allowance for different learning/teaching methods to be used (Ashman & Elkins, 2008). For example, vision impaired students would benefit greatly from auditory based lessons. As pointed out in a Felder (2005) paper, certain learners process information more efficiently if sensory learning styles are considered (e.g., audio).

The link below is of a music track I downloaded from a royalty free website (imcompetech) as an example of music that could be used for a class project e.g. background music for a visual presentation. I chose this track because I believe it will help create a peaceful mood and also assist drawing attention to a presentation.

(Music link)
Thanks for listening.
Jim

Ashman, A., & Elkins, J. (2008). Education for Inclusion and Diversity. Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education Australia.


Felder, M., R. (2005). Understanding student differences. Retrieved August 3, 2009, from http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Understanding_Differences.pdf


Mclnerney, D. M, & Mclnerney, V. (2006). Educational psychology constructing learning. Frenchs Forest, NSW, Australia: Pearsons Education Australia.

Music: Easy Jam, Kevin MacLeod: http://incompetech.com/

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net