I can’t believe it is finished!  Two years of technology explorations and there is still so much to learn. Some of the highlights of the COETAIL program for me  include:

I have been pushed  to think and […]

I’m sure you all know it, you all hated it and many of you even lied over it…..the dreaded PRACTICE RECORD.  You likely heard your music teachers try to explain its purpose, telling you that practice makes perfect, but actually perhaps those music teachers were the ones that were not completely being honest the importance of [...]

Please accept my apologies – this post is a little jumpy…BUT…let me start with classroom management.  I feel fortunate to report that after teaching for almost 20 years – my worst classroom management experience remains very clear, not a lot of events but that one something that continues to shape and haunt me as a teacher.  [...]

Social media and the internet have provided people with greater abilities to connect.  As pointed out in Eli Pariser’s , Beware Online “Filter Bubbles” Ted Talks some of the topics of these connections may be quite trivial, but as proven in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa,  some of the topics of these connections [...]

Although I have found innumerable posts on flipped classrooms in almost every other imaginable subject area, I have yet to find a single one on flipping a band class.   I was very excited to find Clintondale High School , an entirely flipped highschool in Michigan and thought for sure this would present me with my flipped band model, [...]

  “10,000 hours to master anything” – that’s according to Malcolm Gladwell anyway!  While many have plenty to say about the exact number of hours it takes to master something, the 10,000 hour rule does make me think about the number of hours I have spent practicing -  practicing music, scuba diving, and even technology.  You see when I [...]

  Although my colleague Chris Fox may have positive thoughts and sounds of swishes when he thinks of nets, for me, my first thought of nets, are of the destruction that many nets have caused our world oceans.  For me I think of the number of nets I have seen while diving, the nets that suffocate the coral [...]

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo

Musicians take pride in the fact that music expresses far more than what words could ever do.  So what happens when you try to teach music and you need to put into words all the affects and meanings that [...]

Sadly most of us will likely never be ever to own an island, but thanks to a great free, no sign-up required website, Isle of Tune anyone who can’t afford to buy their own island will now at least be able to build one.  At first glance one might presume Isle of Tune to be yet another gaming site, [...]

 As a music teacher I am always concerned about listening.   Especially for musicians, listening to sound is very different than hearing sound.   Listening involves thinking, processing, evaluating, understanding and engaging with the music that is being played.   But in the world we live today, do students really engage in the music they hear?  …[Read more]