Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

Yesterday, I received an email from Apple announcing iTunes U. As Apple states on its website: “iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 50,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world. With iTunes U, there’s no end to what or where you can learn.”

I opened iTunes and used the search tool to see what “music” in iTunes U would produce. 150 items appeared from such universities as Yale Music, Arizona State university, Vanderbilt University and more.

When I began listening to the tracks, it made me wish that this was around when I was in college. You can find lectures, musical performances, and even lesson plans. I listened to and watched some excellent music performances from “Appalachian Celebration: A Celebration of the Life and Music of David Schnaufer” and two wonderful lesson plans from Andrea Peterson, 2007 National teacher of the Year, as a part of Smithsonian Global Sound Activities. When you listen to her first lesson, she describes a website to use in a multi-cultural music lesson. Her second lesson gives an excellent integration activity for 4th grade music and social studies classes. If you click “get” next to the lesson plans listed in the Smithsonian Global list, you can acquire 19 pdf files, all are free lesson plans on multi-cultural music.

There are several podcasts from classes, concerts, and lectures. You can also find tutorials–one I found on how to use GarageBand ‘08. The possibilities are endless.

As a resource for teachers, this is a great way to find music, lessons, videos, tutorials, or to hear lectures on current music education topics. However, I also have to think about what this means for colleges. If I were an undergrad and missed a class, being able to download the lecture through iTunes U is a great advantage. Or, if I were studying for the final, to be able to take a Saturday and listen to all of the lectures from the semester would help my studying considerably. However, one must wonder, if you can download all of the video lectures from iTunes U, then why would you get up for that 8:00 am class? What does this mean for education?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Lesson Plans, 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.