Music Teacher Resources

I found a site called Music Teachers Helper which has a blog maintained by eight authors. The authors are all musicians and mostly private teachers with their own studios. None the less, most of their advice and experience can be applied to the school classroom.
There is a sidebar option that allows you to organize the blog entries by category, which is very helpful. The categories include music & technology, music news, teaching tips and many more.

The next step in human evolution?

Has anyone else heard of Indigo children? According to some people they are the next level of human development. According to others they are just in closer harmony with their spiritual side.

Just a few of the characteristics of Indigo children:

• Have strong self esteem

• Have difficulty with discipline and authority

• Are rather creative

• Display strong intuition

• Have strong empathy for others
  

• Develop abstract thinking very young

• Are gifted and/or talented, highly intelligent

• Are talented daydreamers and visionaries

And here's the kicker:

• Have spiritual intelligence and/or psychic skills

• Are here to change the world - to help us live in greater harmony and peace with one another

I think it's important to know about this because even if you don't believe there are Indigo children (particularly the last two points), you can't deny that the way children behave and learn is changing. Not to mention that there are parents out there who are convinced that their children are Indigo, or what if you do have a student who suddenly shows psychic skills, how do you deal with that as a teacher?

Here are some links to more information on Indigo children for those who I have intrigued:
Wikipedia
Metagifted
YouTube:
ABC News
The Indigo Revolution

War Dance

I came across an interesting documentary about students in war-torn northern Uganda. Their stories are tragic and horrifying; some have seen their families and friends killed, and some have been the killers, just to survive.
The film follows the students from the Patongo refugee camp as they prepare for, and compete in the Ugandan National Music Competition. No one expects them to win, as the film's site says "schools in refugee camps don't win awards."
This would be a great tool to use in some music and world affairs classes. I would ask my students to discuss the power of music, why does it have this power, and how does it compare to their own experiences?
It is rated PG-13, and the subject matter is upsetting in many ways, so it would only be appropriate for high school and some middle schools.
Any other ideas in regard to how to use this as a teaching tool?

Citizen Schools

I found Courtney's blog on citizen schools very intriguing. I had never heard of such a thing before. What really excites me about them is the hands on experience and the role of the community as the teachers.
To me, there is no better way to learn, than to do, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and do again. I think that there is a lot of pressure in traditional schools to get it right the first time. This can be detrimental to the learning process because many students are afraid to explore and question for fear of being wrong.
With community members involved in the learning process, students get to see the working world as a real place, rather than some mysterious place that you are only told about, by people who only work in schools anyway. The community also has the opportunity to benefit from these schools because they will get to see how this new generation works and learns, and what they are capable of. It also has the potential to strengthen the community and their sense of responsibility for the youth, and the future workforce.
Courtney mentions some topics that citizen schools cover that were never covered in all my day's in public school, such as buying a car and other finance issues. If kids don't learn about this from school or their parents, where are they going to learn it? I've met college kids who don't know how to balance a checkbook! These citizen schools provide the opportunity to teach kids what they don't learn (but probably should) in school.

Tech Habits

The article 20 Tech Habits to Improve Your Life provided some helpful suggestions for using technology to make things easier. I think that the keystroke shortcuts are a great suggestion. I already use a few of them and if I knew more I'm sure I would use them too. I think that I should take the advice of keeping my inbox clean. My inbox is a mass of personal messages, school mailings, political messages, and advertisements. I find the clutter overwhelming, but I have some kind of compulsion to keep them all. I think I'm afraid that I'll accidentally lose something important. The suggestion of having the Action, Later and Archive folders would make me feel much better about the whole thing. I think that balancing a checkbook and managing your finances is just as easily done on paper as it is on a computer, and the same goes for calendars, email notices so that you don't forget your own mother's birthday seems like you're relying too much on technology to run your life and do the thinking for you.

Pandora and the Music Genome Project

First and foremost, if you love music, if you love free music, if you love finding new music, go to Pandora. It's part of the Music Genome Project and it allows you to create your own "radio stations" where you have relative control over what is played.
How does it work? (You can go to the MGP link above and get the technical version or you can read my generalized version.)
You type in an artist or a song, and Pandora picks out the elements of that artist or song and finds more music with similar qualities. That music is added to your station, but it doesn't stop there. You can give each song a "thumbs up" (play more music like this!) or a "thumbs down" (never play this song again!). There's even an option to take a song off the station for a month if you get tired of it.
Pandora has exposed me to many new artists, and it's always the first place I go if I'm going to be online for a while. The potential for this site is to boost the exposure of artists who would otherwise "go under the radar" so to speak.
On a side note, the RIAA is demanding major royalty fees from Pandora, to the point where it makes keeping Pandora afloat, quite difficult.

Edit>
How can teachers use Pandora in the classroom?
I think that Pandora gives students the oportunity to learn about analizing music. They can create a station, or go a a precreated station by the teacher, listen to a few songs, and then explain what elments the songs have in common, and how they differ. Pandora also provides some of that information if you select the "Why is this song playing" option, so it can even teach the students what to listen for!

Introducing...

Just thought I would give an outline of what you can expect to find in this blog. I plan to deal with the three subjects in the title; music, peace, and education, sometimes they will be separate, but mostly they will be united in some capacity. What I want to do with these subjects is explore their future, their relationship with technology, and what all of this could mean for us.
I will be sharing information that I find relevant to this topic, as well as my opinions, but I also want feedback, and not just the "oh cool" or "that's stupid" kind of feedback. I would like to hear other people's feelings and thoughts, so I will also pose questions to hopefully stimulate your mind and encourage a dialogue.