This week, I continued on my refining and expanding on my lesson plan involving the Optron Mini. There were various places on my lesson plan that needed additional attention. I will go over the highlights to the changes I made.
I first needed to consider how to ensure the facilitator of instruction was comfortable with teaching the material. I considered making a separate document for the teacher so that they could get general information on the Optron Mini so that they would be competent to teach the lesson on it. I instead decided that it may be more beneficial to create an introduction video on the Optron Mini, so that now the teacher and the students could get the primary information in a easy to understand format.
The next thing I needed to consider was making the activities more progressive so that the first one would be very easy, but the following ones would be incrementally more challenging while still not being too difficult to complete. I decided to implement “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as the first song to try playing because it is an extremely easy piece to play, and I wanted to start with the bar low so no students would get discouraged. I left in “Twinkle Twinkle” in to be the medium difficulty song, as it is also very easy, but uses more frets than the previous song. The frets on the Optron Mini take a bit of getting used to, so I didn’t want to overwhelm the students with them right off the bat. By request of Victor, I included “Las Mananitas” as the final song to try and play. This song is quite a step up in difficulty from the last, but is still not too difficult to get through.
Next, I had to implement some open-ended questions into the lesson so that students would have breaks of freedom in the activity. I included a question about programming the number of frets, as well as one on programming the key you are in. These two aspects I felt like were some of the more technical aspects of the lesson, but also the most easy to interpret, as they directly changed the sounds that you could play with the instrument.
To finish things up, I have to tidy things up and try to improve the overall quality of the document by giving it a definitive beginning and end. Below is the attached lesson plan.
In the future, I plan to recreate this lesson plan as a blog in this series to improve the ease of access for students.
