Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

If you are a member of The National Association for Music Education (MENC), then you are probably aware that about two weeks ago, during their final national conference, they debuted the new design of their website. It has a fresh new look and it is much easier to navigate.

One of the best features of this website is the general music forum. MENC includes a forum for general music, chorus, band, future teachers, and Higher Ed/Admin/Research. The general music forum is wonderful for teachers who are novice to veterans in the field. The forum is a place where general music teachers can ask each other questions and seek each other’s advice. For example, recently a music teacher asked a question about purchasing the best glockenspiels for the classroom. In the next three days, 11 teachers had answered with wonderful advice.

If you are not a member of MENC, you can peruse the various posts, however, if you are a member, then you can submit a question so that you can receive multiple answers from various music teachers. In addition, MENC assigns a veteran music teacher to be a monthly mentor who will try to answer every question so that no question is left unanswered.

One item that they did take away when they updated the website was the technology forum. This particular forum was not used often and over the years, MENC stopped having mentors for it. However, there is an excellent technology forum provided by the Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME). If you become a member of TI:ME, you can join the TI:ME Yahoo group. Then, if you ever have a technology question that you need answered, you just have to type it to the Yahoo group. Usually, it takes less than 24 hours before many technology gurus like current TI:ME president, Dr. Tom Rudolph, will answer you. It is a wonderful organization whose goal is to assist music teachers with music technology.

Have you ever used the MENC music forums or the TI:ME forum to assist you?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 12:29 am and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.