Welcome!
This website
explores ways in which music technology can improve access to music for
everyone and enrich music lessons for pupils and teachers, alike. It
builds on the personal research of Audrey Podmore, UK music teacher and
educational technology consultant.
Fruits of Labour
In "Music Technology and Curriculum Access, A Study" and on
this website, I seek to share those ways of using technology which, in
my experience, support familiar classroom practice and keep the focus
firmly on the music. Right from the start, my attitude was "Unless
technology will enable us to do something we can't do already or to do
it more effectively, we haven't got time for it."
The
most successful activities, in my experience, are those that facilitate
an integrated approach to the Performing, Composing, Appraising and
Listening strands of the curriculum, so this is reflected in GridPlay
resource packs.
My exploration of music technology
began in the early '80s, when I was teaching young people with physical
disabilities. I was committed to creative-approach music teaching and
my pupils were fired up with ideas, the realisation and development of
which were frustrated by the constraints of disability. Fortunately, at
about that time, research into the use of computers for music
composition, hitherto restricted to university departments and
main-frame computers, began to be taken up by educational pioneers and
applied to micro-computers.
Driven by the urgent needs
of my pupils, I threw myself into researching every piece of hardware
and software that came to my attention. Much of the latter was
disappointingly narrow in focus - it had its uses but it was never
going to meet the needs of my ambitious young musicians. I avidly
sought out the few resources that supported real musicianship and
extended the musical experience of pupils.
In 2005, I
achieved a long-standing ambition to harness the power of York
University's remarkable MIDIgrid software in ready-made resources that
can be used immediately by specialist and non-specialist teachers
alike, integrating with acoustic classroom resources. GridPlay:
Creative Explorations, published by The Full Pitcher Music Resources,
builds on much of the research described on this site and provides
exploratory materials to support improvisation and composition from
pre-school to adult.
On this website, in the Study and in GridPlay resources, I present only what I and my pupils have found useful and rewarding.