Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

Twitter has been coming so popular these days that schools are beginning to use it as a teaching tool in their classrooms. When I taught my music technology course for elementary music teacher this past summer, I included web 2.0 (which included Twitter) because it is a technology tool that every educator should know about. Whether or not you decide to utilize it, your students are most likely sending tweets at least once a day to their friends and anyone else who will follow them. It is good for educators to know about because it is important that we know what are students are using, listening to and more, outside the classroom. This makes us better educators and we can then relate well to our students. Think about this: You could ask your students to write about what the piece that they listened to in your classroom, or you could ask them to respond to the music class blog that you created for them. The writing assignment achieves some standard replies of “I like the music. It was nice.” The blog will achieve answers which much greater depth because the students are used to blogging and feel very comfortable with it. In addition, they like to read the other responses. One example that convinced me of this was when Jim Frankel posted the question “What is music?” to his middle schoolers. Check the answers on his blog he used with his middle school music class: http://whatismusic.pbworks.com/

Twitter differs because you can only post 140 characters. Some people post their status and what they are doing at this time. (As you see in a current commercial where the father tweets “I am sitting on the porch” which in turn, frustrates his teenage son.) However, many music educators use twitter to post about resources, concert performances, educational experiences and more. In Jim’s blog, he suggested that teachers could use twitter to follow a current musician. His suggestion made me look for some of my favorite musicians to see if they tweet in hopes of following them!

Here are some more examples:

• In an article published this past weekend, you can read about Passage Middle School where the school tweets and the classes will blog this year.
• Joe Pisano just wrote an excellent blog post about “The Top Music Pedagogues to Follow on Twitter.” (Thank you for including me Joe! I hope to meet the criteria soon.)
• The organization that I am President-Elect, TI:ME (Technology Institute for Music Educators), just began a twitter.
• When I went to the MENC Music Technology Academy this past June, I met Andy Zweibel, a music education major at the University of Miami and a fabulous blogger. He also tweeted throughout the entire conference, which was absolutely great because you got to read what was going on in the conference as it was happening. This is a wonderful advantage to experiencing a conference session when you cannot make it in person. He runs an excellent website geared towards providing news, resources, and tips for music education majors. Please check it out!
• Finally, I tweet every time I have a new blog post. But, after reading these articles about Twitter, I am inspired to tweet a little more often and add tweets about resources, links, articles, and lesson materials that I use often in my classroom.

Do you tweet? Do you utilize it in your classroom?