The Four Ward Schools
Douglas as Education
Aug|17|2008
I’ve been looking at the development of downtown Albuquerque neighborhoods recently, and I’ve always been interested in the old schools of Albuquerque, many of which are still around but have different uses today. Some have a notorious reputation like the Albuquerque Indian School, or a much loved reputation like Old Albuquerque High. Most of these schools are overlooked today – Old Armijo, Aztec, Coronado, Harwood, John Marshall, Lincoln, Montgomery, Old Pajarito, Santa Barbara, Stronghurst, West San Jose. Many of these schools were closed in the mid-seventies, while other closed even earlier. What are the school sites with the oldest schools still in use? Also, what school sites are still used for education.
John Lewis
Aug|16|2008
I’m working at Eugene Field Elementary this year and discovered a famous jazz musician is an alumnus. John Lewis, pianist and music director for the Modern Jazz Quartet. I’m sure only a handful of adults, and no children at the school even know who he is, so I plan to change that this year.
Kaosillator Kunstler
Aug|13|2008
For the new school year I’m add this to the technology unit. I played around with it this evening and the features are simple but very musical. This is basically a trackpad synth, and looping recorder that fits in the palm of your hand and runs off batteries. You can’t save the grooves and there is no midi and only RCA and miniphono out so it is definitely aimed at DJ’s with very little musical background. The quality of the sounds, taken from the Korg Radias Analog modeling synth, are great. The trackpad uses the X axis to contol pitch and the Y axis for velocity, filter, or LFO effects. The phrase length is limited to 8 beats or 16 if you disable the undo feature. This isn’t the main focus of the device anyway. Making music with a few swipes of the finger is why I hope to get younger children creating. I played around a bit, recording a sitar solo over a drum and bass type phrase. Everything was recorded live into Logic.
Kaossilator Raga Sample (ACC file)
Blog Class
Mar|5|2008
Today I’m teaching about blogging so this is our first post together
We can use pictures
See, here we ARE.
We can also add links
We know how to add audio
We can also add movies
Creating the Diddys of Tomorrow
Douglas as Education, Music, Recording
Jan|30|2008
I started using Garageband with my students today. It is part of an ongoing project to incorporate more technology into my instruction. I started the year by using an LCD projector to display songs and listening maps, (a visual representation of a song) to improve my students literacy skills. They became more familiar with seeing music notation and following along with a recording. Later, I started recording Read the rest of this entry »