I enjoy opportunities to be creative. I have my whole life. I grew up with Legos, I did art (thanks Mom!), still do music, worked backstage at my high school theatre department designing and building sets, and just being creative all around. Of course the tolls of growing up diminished those opportunities due to the new time-consuming responsibilities of being a working adult and family man. However now they're back, except they've adapted to my daily life with the help of a personal interest (technology) and passion (teaching, aka my job).

I've been able to get my creative juices up and running again while being a part of Microsoft's Innovative Educator Expert program. The MIE expert program has been praised for many reasons, such as it's incredible PLN community, the monthly skype meetings, and the events we attend. However, for me, what I love about the MIE program is the challenge and opportunity for creativity it presents to me: "Here are a bunch of tools and resources, now what can I do with them?" For me, being an educator and techy person already, this is more "fun" for me than being "work". Here’s why.

The daily grind of my job isn't boring, it's fun! Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my students are boring, or that teaching them is boring. I enjoy teaching, and every day is a new day with my students. What the MIE program does for me is it taps into the creative aspect of TPACK (the intersection of technology, pedagogy, and content). It has created opportunities for me to imagine and find out "what if I did this?" and "how could I do that?" in my classroom. It has given me a new mindset and a new perspective to how I approach many aspects of my professional life. So how can this happen?

For the past four years, Microsoft has introduced new tools, resources, and mediums that can be integrated into the classroom. The cool part is how there is a cohesive harmony created when they're all working together.

• They've created and improved a practical, functional, and seamless digital inking environment within the Windows 10 user experience (and it's getting better in a couple weeks when they release the anniversary update!).
• They've created the Surface platform that naturally integrates and takes advantage of digital ink and the versatility of Windows 10. I've got tablet mode, desktop mode, input through pen, mouse, a removable keyboard, and touch. I have many options for getting work done that adapt to all the different environments for using a computer, including your lap ;-)
• They've evolved the Office Suite and aren't showing signs of slowing down. It's just incredible. Just within a few years Office 365 is now collaborative, cloud based yet runs locally on your computer, and has grown with the addition of Office Mix, Snip, Sway, Forms, Office Lens, Microsoft Classroom, Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, the Education Community, Groups, and Mystery Skype just to name a few. The apps we grew up with (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are still my standards for content creation, have adapted to the digital ink environment, and are available for practically every device out there. And of course there is OneNote. If you use OneNote then you're already nodding your head in agreement. It's like the app is on steroids right now with Classroom and Staff Notebook, Learning Tools, LMS integration, and who knows what else is in the pipeline.

With all of this available, now the question is "how do I make it work for me in the music classroom?" That's the fun part. Being in the MIE program has motivated me to get access to all of these tools and resources, and let my imagination take over. With all this available for me (thank you #SurfaceExpert program!), I get to figure out what the possibilities are for integrating all of it into my classroom instruction so my students receive a better music education. This is the fun creative part of being an MIE expert. I get to figure out "With all of this, what can I do with it?"

Over the course of my MIE experience I've been able to improve my pedagogy by incorporating ELA writing and math into my instruction, create a better instructional environment for my students, create all sorts of resources, create new classroom routines that work better for my students and me, improve and create new classroom content and activities, and the list goes on. At the same time, all of this has never felt like "work" to me because I'm doing something I already enjoy; using my imagination to innovate and create.

Finding out the affordances of technology isn't just limited to the classroom part of my job. I've been able to use the same Microsoft Devices + Win10 + Software combo to improve the "business" aspect of being a teacher. The paperwork, the meetings, the observations, the collaboration, the trainings, and the trainings of others.

So this is what I enjoy the most about being an MIE, and the imaginative part is reinforced by all the interactions with the other members of the group. Getting to hear and see what everyone else is doing only fuels my fire for innovating and creating.

For all you creatives out there in the classroom that are looking for ways to turn the "daily grind" into a fresh new experience for you and your students, head over to aka.ms/mie and fill out the application. You'll be amazed at how being a part of the MIE program can transform and foster your perspective on the benefits of educational technology.

So, can I create an Office Form, link it to Power BI, and then show data capture in real time? Lets find out :-)

​The data comes from this Office Form.

Recently I hosted an online PD webinar over at SimpleK12.com. My webinar was about how I've been collecting assessment data from my students, and by using Excel I can do some cool analysis tricks to get some meaningful feedback not only for myself, but also for my students. I've used the data to set up a reflection essay writing assignment, which blends my music pedagogy with some Common Core ELA anchor standards, and some Math standards too. There is also a bit in the webinar where I talk about using Excel to dig a little deeper into a spreadsheet downloaded from a recent Kahoot formative assessment activity I did with my students. There are all sorts of formative assessment tools available these days, and they give you a spreadsheet after the assessment is done and over with. So what do you do with that data? Can you do something? In my webinar I talk about how I've recoded the data so it makes more sense to me and my students. You can watch the webinar here.

​The slide deck from my webinar is below

Finally!

Recently I guest blogged on a couple of websites. I wrote one on how the StaffPad app has been changing my pedagogy in the music classroom. You can find it over at the Daily Adventures blog.

​I also wrote one on how using a Surface in my classroom has transformed my instructional practices, and is a seriously awesome machine for the classroom. It's actually over on the Surface Blog, and....there's a video :-)

​So my classroom was filmed for a couple days to make the video. My students really enjoyed it, and it was a great opportunity for me to explain some of the ins and outs of the film industry to them. They were pretty psyched too when they saw the final product months after the initial filming. 

​Check it out

After hearing about all the formative rage last school year, I decided to dive in and check out Kahoot. I tested it out with my music students with some beginning-of-the-year school rules, and they loved it immediately. I was hooked (so were my students!), so I started brainstorming on how I could adapt the Kahoot platform into my music curriculum.

It's the beginning of the school year, and before I teach my advanced students their theory lessons, they need to review the names of the notes on the Treble and Bass Clef​ staffs. That's simple enough, I could just upload some images of notes into Kahoot for my students to look at and answer. As usual though, I got some crazy idea to make it a little bit more interesting. 

I wanted to create a little bit of tension with my students when the question popped onto the screen. Each question would start with blank staff, and then students would see a note drawn on a particular line or space of the music staff. A static image wouldn't do this for me, but an animated gif would. I did some detective work, and sure enough, Kahoot supports animated gifs :-)

So, I needed to figure out a way to create an animated gif of me drawing a note on a music staff. Thankfully, the team that created Office Mix recently created a new tool called Snip​ that enabled me to get the job done. Snip turns my Surface's screen into a recordable whiteboard (although, it's not white). After starting the capture process, I can annotate on my screen and then save the capture as a .mp4 video file. That's pretty cool. I needed a nice big music staff to draw my notes on. No problem, I have StaffPad.

​Using StaffPad as a backdrop, I quickly recorded myself with Snip drawing various notes on the Bass and Treble Clef. The process was pretty simple. Watch the video below to see how it worked.

I've create an animated gif before in Adobe Premiere Pro, so that's where I went first to turn my snipped videos into gifs. It wasn't working out. The files were too big (over 5mb) and reducing the file size only made things get weird. I did some re(search) on how to make an animated gif, and it turns out people use Adobe Photoshop to make them.

I watched some tutorials, figured out the process, and I was set. Using Photoshop I was able to import the videos and export them as animated gifs. I uploaded them into Kahoot, created my assessment quiz, and I was good to go.

My students had a blast. My classroom doesn't have devices for them to use, so I had them pair up into teams using their smartphones. The French horns and Cellos won, of course! My students had fun, and I got the formative data I needed. The verdict: we're going to need to review some more :-)

Snip is pretty cool, and has a bunch more features as well (audio recording!). I can see myself in the future using the same process to create quick theory examples that I can throw into a Sway and share with my students. ​

The following is a response to a comment left on my blog, asking some questions regarding what I've been writing about.

"I have a couple of questions. Do you recommend a specific projector? Obviously it needs Miracast functionality, but I'm otherwise clueless. Also, when you import a picture of music, can you erase your writing without erasing parts of the picture? I'd like to write on staff paper, but be able to erase and rewrite something without erasing the staff lines."

As I was writing a response, I figured anyone who reads this website should get it too, so here it is :-)

Aaron,

Thanks for reading! I'm glad to hear you're looking to abandon the green chalkboard :-)

Regarding your questions, connecting to a projector via Miracast involves using a Miracast receiver that is plugged into the projector. Here is a list of Miracast receivers on amazon.

I started using the Netgear PVT3000, and have since moved on to the Microsoft wireless display adaptor (smaller, less wires). To use these, your projector needs an HDMI input port to plug the receiver into. Miracast will transmit both video and audio from your computer, so if your projector has speakers, or you plug some in, you'll be able to hear the audio streaming too. 

The Staffpad app only handles the importing of musicxml files. If you have a piece of music already in the musicxml format, you could then open it up in Staffpad and edit the notation. If you want to be able to take a picture of some sheet music and then edit it, then you'll need to use an application that will scan sheet music and save it in the musicxml format. Programs that do this are available, but they are also pricey. While researching this, I think I may have found a nice workaround. It is a bit more tricky and has some steps to it, but so far it's free. This is what I did.

I'm sure there will be some partial loss of the original score, but it may keep enough for you to work with. Definitely worth giving it a try.

The data gathering portion of my Thesis is done! Whew! I actually managed to get some teachers to interact with my e-learning app. Analysis has begun, and results are looking pretty good :-)

So what! Don't you want to see what I did? Well, here you go. My TPACK (Z)app.

You'll see that it is not actually fully complete. When I designed the module, I had a grand plan for it, but I couldn't get the whole thing done on time. After a much needed break, I'll probably begin working on the remaining core subject sections, as well as another end game activity involving classroom/tablet management.

My blog is going to be looking weird right now as I test some stuff out. Everything it still there :-)