September 10, 2015

I went to be shortly after nine o'clock last night. I woke up a few different times throughout the night and it felt great every single time rolling over and going back to sleep.

Today at work I did things. Most of which were work related. Most of which aren't worth writing about. This afternoon I went down and helped one of the kindergarten teachers set up his computer so he could demonstrate to his class how to get started in Compass Learning. That seems to be a good technique, rather than trying to go through it in the lab. There were plenty of difficulties when the class came to the lab but I think it would have been worse.

I got an email from my partner in my collection development class where we have to analyze a the collection development policy for a library. Initially he suggested we do a cartoon library but we didn't think their policy was big enough, and we couldn't find the policy for the larger university library. Today he threw out the idea of doing the music library where he interviewed one of the librarians for one of our other classes. He also mentioned that we could do the research together, I could make the presentation, and he would record it. He suggested I make the presentation because he liked the comic book one I did last Spring.

Making that reference, and suggesting a music library, brought on a moment of inspiration. I thought it would be cool to have a piece of sheet music in Prezi, kind of like the comic book page I made. The title would be the name of the library, the subtitle the name of the assignment, we would be the composers, and the content of the presentation would be the notations or lyrics on the page. It all kind of came to me in a flash and it looked pretty cool in my head so I started looking up sheet music. I could find any with open usage rights that looked right and I didn't want to use any copyrighted stuff because I prefer to avoid copyrighted stuff for class projects. I also started thinking it would kind of be a bit of a pain to edit an existing piece of music so then I had the thought of making my own.

I looked around the internet and found a free program where you can create your own sheet music. You create the music by picking the type of note you want and hitting the corresponding key on the keyboard for the note you want. It is pretty intuitive but also kind of hard to wrap your mind around typing out music. The coolest part is probably the ability to play back what you have created. I started making random stuff that I thought would sound cool and then I got the main song from Willy Wonka stuck in my head and ended up putting that in. It doesn't really what the music sounds like, though, because no one will ever actually hear it, I just want it to look real (and cool). If it actually sounds interesting though, that would be a bonus.

A little later I heard from my partner again and he learned that the music library didn't actually have their own policy, they just used the larger library's policy. That was disappointing but I really like my presentation idea so I looked around and found what seems to be a decent policy for another music library and sent it his way so we'll see what he thinks.

At the end of the work day I started working on recreating a worksheet for a teacher so I've got finishing that on my plate tomorrow. I am also hoping the last teacher will sign up for MAP testing so I can finalize my testing schedule and get that posted. I also need the last one or two seating charts. I think it is actually just one, from that same teacher. I sent out a blanket email to all the teachers today but if she hasn't signed up tomorrow I'll have to email her directly. We'll see. I will also probably continue to work on my sheet music in my free time. I'm going to end up spending way too much time on this presentation.