Music

Did you ever want to show the students the mistakes that keep occurring within their writing as a class? Do you want to show them the variety of words, or lack of, that are a part of their writing? There is an easy and very visual way to do this called Word Clouds. You can enter an entire class of papers by copying and pasting using digital copies of student papers before they turn in their finals.      www.wordle.net

Once you have entered the papers, the words that are not common like "the" or "it" can be removed and the rest of the vocabulary used by a class put together. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. Above is a demonstration of a paper that was entered into Wordle and you can see the correlation to how often a word is used. The same will show up with common mistakes in spelling.

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Engagement is something that music does already, but to be able to put a composition, song, or melody into a physical form that has been tested over and over again by many different teachers or musicians does wonders. Here is one program that will help and is FREE.

You can practice with this program at Finale NotePad. I have not played an instrument in years, but I can see that this application will help with students who are learning recorders all the way up to professional musicians. Please look at the Mathematics section for a cross-curriculum idea.

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Do you want to discuss the fractal and chaos theory with your students? Again music with the application of Mathematics will allow for a visual and aural illustration that might fascinate your students. I cannot explain these concepts myself, but this would be an interesting site for those teachers who are interested in creating something different with their students.

This animated GIF attractor is from Sprott's Fractal Gallery. This is only one of many different examples that Julien C. Sprott has on his webpage.