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: Creating Recorder Books

February 01, 2022 / Amy M. Burns

As an assessment for a recorder playing and comprehension, the third graders created recorder books to be used by the next year’s recorder students. We use the app book creator to write about the recorder and create audio files and videos of recorder songs. The third graders were given guidelines to create ebooks that had title pages, audio recordings, video recordings, and included four to six tips about playing the recorder. Using Book Creator was wonderful for the students as the app is very self-intuitive and the students enjoyed using it immensely. Creating a book allowed the students to display their creativity from writing to performing. For the music educator, this was a wonderful assessment tool so that I could see how much they learned and retained from the unit.

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