Amy M. Burns

Elementary Music Technology and Integration

Amy M. Burns has taught PreK-grade 4 general music for over 25 years at Far Hills Country Day School (FH) (https://www.fhcds.org/). She also teaches grade 5 instrumental class, directs the FH Modern Band, is the Performing Arts Department Manager, and teaches privately in the after-school conservatory, having served as director for over 20 years. She has authored four books and numerous articles on integrating technology into the elementary music classroom. She has presented many sessions on the topic, including four keynote addresses in TX, IN, St. Maarten, and AU. She is the recipient of the 2005 Technology in Music Education (TI:ME) Teacher of the Year, the 2016 New Jersey Music Educators Association (NJMEA) Master Music Teacher, the 2016 Governor’s Leader in Arts Education, the 2017 NJ Nonpublic School Teacher of the Year, and the 2026 NJMEA Distinguished Service Awards. Her most recent publication, Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches (2020), is available from Oxford University Press (OUP) and Amazon. Burns is also the Community Coordinator for Midnight Music (MMC) at https://midnightmusic.com/, the General Music Chair for NJMEA Board of Directors, and the Elementary Music Consultant for MusicFirst (https://www.musicfirst.com/), a company built by music educators for music educators, dedicated to helping music teachers and their students make the most of technology in the classroom.

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Assessment: Assessment through a podcast

January 24, 2022  /  Amy M. Burns

In preparation for their Peter and the Wolf podcasts, the 1st graders studied the instruments and the characters, listened and drew to the story narrated by Leonard Bernstein, watched the Disney version of the story, assessed their knowledge with Martha’s excellent notebook file for the interactive whiteboard that can be found here, and then produced a podcast of Peter and the Wolf. The podcast served as the assessment tool. For this podcast, the students had to tell me what to narrate (retell the story), they had to choose classroom instruments to perform their assigned characters, and they had to explain why they chose the instrument to represent their characters.

We used GarageBand to create these podcasts. These will probably be our last podcasts as the current GarageBand application for the computer no longer supports podcasts. However, using the book creator app or explain everything classic app, we could do something very similar. Stay tuned!

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