I was doing my weekly look around at the other music education sites that I follow when I saw Joe Pisano posting about his work with a web site called iSchoolBand that sounded kind of interesting. I've always been a dabbler in web sites that promise to make organizing and communicating with students outside of class a more simplified task. I've tried a bunch of alternatives, Ning, Google Groups, and others, but at least at first glance iSchoolBand actually looks like it might fit my needs a little bit better than the others I have tried in the past.
If you are interested in this topic take a look at his post about the iSchoolBand site over at MusTech.net. He is also giving away a bunch of free promo codes to his readers that give a user one free year of access to the iSchoolBand service. Take a look and see what you think!
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A few days ago a fellow music ed blogger named Thomas West tweeted about a news story he read about the Massachusetts legislature considering a law to require schools to santize their instruments each school year and to promote band instrument cleaning and hygiene practices to prevent infection. When I first heard it I thought it might be just something that was a knee jerk reaction to the H1N1 Swine Flu stuff. Chances are that the flu pandemic did have something to do with it but after reading the story I still wonder how people can be so badly misinformed as to recommend a proceedure that costs hundreds of dollars per instrument versus the chemical cleaning job that my local music store does for less than $75.
I recently finished a review of the new Rhythm Heaven video game for the Nintendo DS portable game system. I was looking at it as a part of my research for an article on using portable devices in the music classroom (iPhones, Nintendo DS, etc). What I expected to find was another Guitar Hero type game but what I was pleased to discover instead was that Rhythm Heaven is a game that I don't think I would mind letting my students play as a reward or as a put away activity.
Is this irony, stupidity, or just plain... dumb? Pasted below is a link to a video at VIMIO that shows an actual DMCA hearing at the Library of Congress where the Motion Picture Association of America actually demonstrates the proper way to copy a DVD movie for educational purposes. I'll give you a quick hint. It includes using a camcorder, a television screen, and a darkened room...
Every so often you will see a video about someone trying to break a wine glass by singing very loudly. Old movies and cartoons are ripe with this seeming cliche, but some physicists still banter about the question of whether or not a human voice can actually do it. Well, a high school physics teacher in had one of his school's more talented male students try the trick, and after a lot of practice he actually learned how to do it.
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Read more: Linking Physics To Music By Breaking Wine Glasses
Several months ago I posted an article titled How To Teach Music Lessons Via The Internet. Following the publication of it I had had several people contact me asking if I knew of any directories where potential students could find teachers that are willing to teach instrumental or voice lessons over the Internet using videoconferencing. While there are several places out there that people can find a music teacher there were none that I could find that specialized in this new, virtual type of instruction. I finally got around to putting together an online music lesson directory, but decided to go beyond just providing a place for virtual lesson instructors.Â
Read more: Online Music Lesson Directory Now Open For Registration
I just finished a Skype chat with George Litterst, the founder of a company called TimeWarp Technologies. George is a pianist and music educator that I have used as a source for other articles I have written on the topic of teaching music over the Internet. He is going to be Skyping in to speak with the audience of a session I will be giving in a couple of weeks at the Iowa Bandmaster's Conference, and he wanted to give me a tour of his Internet MIDI product. I went into the call expecting to just see little more than a glorified on screen MIDI keyboard, but came out realizing that he has really got some potential there that could become a serious technological tool for the music education classroom.
Schools all over the country are struggling with money issues, some are cutting music programs to the detriment of their most needy students. In a video news story from the New York Times a student from a school in Newark, Ohio shows just how important music programs can be. If we cut back on music programs what will be left for students like this one? Take a look, and pass this one on.
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