Regardless of which December holidays you and your students celebrate, it's likely that music and the arts will play a large role in your exploration and celebration of these special times. So this month, Sun Associates News focuses on ideas and resources for the integration of technology into music curriculum.

Lois Reynolds, our resident music educator (and software engineer...but that's a whole other story), has written a feature and integration idea that each provide a number of suggestions for applying technology to music and other subject area curricula. This month's Web Spotlight showcases a wealth of WWW resources and curriculum ideas for music and arts activities. Finally, our Tech Tip of the Month provides some useful ideas for how to organize all of those digital images you want to include in MS Office applications.

As this year draws to a close, we at Sun Associates want to thank all of our continuing readers and welcome those many new readers of this monthly service. We hope you all have the opportunity to take at least a little rest and relaxation this holiday season, and extend our sincere wishes that you have a happy -- and hopefully more peaceful -- new year.

IN THIS ISSUE:

I. THIS MONTH'S FEATURE: Integrating Music and Technology

II. INTEGRATION IDEA OF THE MONTH: All the Buzz About Baroque

III. WEB SPOTLIGHT: Focus on Art Web Sites

IV. TECH TIP OF THE MONTH: Creating and Using an Image Library

V. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE

Back issues of Sun Associates News are available online.

I. THIS MONTH'S FEATURE: Integrating Music and Technology

Our Sun Associates News theme for December is music and technology. In keeping with this them, our feature article this month offers five ideas for integrating technology in music education.

Whether you are a music teacher looking for ways to enhance your lessons or a teacher of another subject who would like to integrate music into the curriculum, technology is a sure bet for engaging, hands-on learning activities for your students.

For example, as a social studies project you might want your students to create a poster that describes a particular composer or historical period through an overview of its music. Technology could be used to support the research and production of that poster. Alternatively, as a music teacher, you could choose to feature various types of World Music in a multimedia Hyperstudio stack where the cards could be created by individual students or small groups. The end results of either of these highly engaging projects would be wonderful "show and tell" pieces for students to present, compare with other students' work, or show off at an open house.

Find the full feature article on integrating music and technology online.

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II. INTEGRATION PROJECT OF THE MONTH: All the Buzz About Baroque

By Lois Reynolds

The artistic expressions of a historical period are a tangible piece of the fabric of its culture. When these cultural expressions are introduced into the classroom, a door is opened into an entirely new society; one perhaps distinctly different than our own.

This month's integration project is designed to enlighten students about a period of music known as the Baroque (1600-1750). How much do your students know about this period of history? What strides were made in scientific discovery, architecture, and mathematics at that time? What does the word "Baroque" mean?

Access the complete lesson plan for this musical history project online.

Curriculum Area: Music/Music History
Grade Level: 6-8
Skills Developed: Students will work cooperatively, utilizing the library and the Internet for research. Students will create a visually attractive and content-rich poster as a product of their learning experience. Students will present information and provide peer evaluation.
Student Grouping: Pairs of students
Time: 8 class periods
Technology Used: Internet, Word Processor

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By Roxanne Schneider

Following this month's theme of technology and the arts, we have collected a set of WWW links that focus on artists and their work.

Busy Teachers' website K-12/Art
This site offers links to several museum sites, such as the Museum of Modern Art, Le Louvre, and the National Gallery of Art. You will also find links to individual artist sites as well as special exhibit sites on photography and computer graphics

Color Theory Online Lesson
This interactive lesson on Color Theory includes online activities, examples of color theory by master artists, puzzles, activities, and many teacher resources.

The Art Institute of Chicago
This site focuses on four areas of the permanent collection, Ancient American Indian Art, African American Art, Impressionism & Postimpressionism, and Modern Art & Contemporary Art. Online resources include lesson plans, family activities, glossaries, and more.

Favorite Lessons
On this teacher-created site you'll find a large assortment of art lessons from early childhood to undergraduate levels. Examples include Egyptian Profile Portraits, Islamic Art/Eraser Prints, Rainsticks and much, more. This is a good place to come for supplementary activities.

Essentials of Music
Dedicated to providing all the best information for classical music lovers, this site offers an overview of the six main periods in music, history, biographies of nearly 70 composers, a musical glossary, and sound tracks to sample.

Dismuke's Virtual Talking Machine
This amazing site provides a collection of vintage music from the early decades of 20th century. Adapted from a personal library of 78 rpm phonograph records, this collection offers over 185 Real Audio recordings of jazz, dance band, swing, and pre-microphone era songs. The site includes download information as well as a message board for people looking to connect with other music lovers.

Midiworld
If you lost your recording of the Bach Minuet in G (or recording of just about anything else for that matter) you could visit and play the MIDI file from the site (harpsichord and all).

The Worldwide Art Gallery
This Australian site is designed to give visitors a chance to expand their knowledge of world art. Here, you can learn about great artists in history, and view collections of famous paintings from the Louvre and the Prado museums.

At Sun Associates, we are always looking for new websites which can help inspire and facilitate teaching and learning in the classroom. Each month in our Web Spotlight, we share some of what we have found. If you would like to share some of the gems that you have discovered, please email us at newsletter@sun-associates.com and we will include your favorites on one of our upcoming lists. Please let us know if we can publish your name, school and/or email address so that teachers may be able to contact you.

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By Kerry McLaughlin

Suppose that each year you teach a unit on Ancient China. If you use photographs and other electronic artwork in the unit's presentations or student reports, you might like to incorporate your collection of photographs and artwork into the existing Microsoft Clip Gallery. This way, you can accommodate easy student access to these resources again and again throughout the project.

In this month's tech tip, learn to create a working library of artwork, photographs, backgrounds and borders for all of your computer projects. Once you have done this, you no longer have to go back to the web for that same picture you remembered seeing last year. Our full instructions will show you how to add images to the Clip Gallery, and customize it for your needs. Once done, it's a snap to use the Gallery to insert images into your Microsoft documents.

Full, step-by-step, directions for this month's Tech Tip are available online.

If you have a tech tip you would like to share with other readers, send it to us via email to newsletter@sun-associates.com. Let us know if we can publish your name and contact information. If we use your tip, we'll send you a gift!

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We hope you enjoyed reading the ideas and information in Sun Associates News. If you have received this newsletter forwarded by a friend and would like to receive your own copy, simply send an email -- with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject -- to us at newsletter@sun-associates.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues via email please let us know. Just put the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject of your email message.

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Sun Associates offers this monthly newsletter as a service to educators interested in issues related to the integration of technology in schools. Our firm specializes in technology evaluation, planning, and professional development. We work with teachers across the country and bring this breadth of experience to all of our work. This newsletter is designed to share some of our recent findings and experiences.

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