This spring I’ll be participating in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Educational Technology. As a music teacher with twenty years of experience I have been ( for the past three or four years) been trying to use blogging in my music classrooms to help students discus music beyond the rehearsal hall. Most teachers get to teach in class, and get to work with students in small groups. In a instrumental music class, however, when you can have anywhere from thirty to seventy  or more students in your ensemble at the same time, it is extremely difficult to interact with every student and to assess each student’s abilities and needs. With blogging, students can keep their practice journals and rehearsal journals online and share their reflections on their own work with the conductor and other ensemble members. It’s a way for me to get inside each and every student’s brain in order to help them become better musicians. It’s also a great way to have students create online critiques, reviews, research projects, and reflections in music.

My goal for ETMOOC is to try and learn more about getting students involved with… and in love with blogging about music. I have had some students who really like writing and reflecting on their work, and they all feel that it’s a worthwhile activity in the music classroom, and I’ve also had many fellow teacher say it’s a great idea. Getting all of my students involved, however, is another issue. I even now have students who have moved onto college and are studying to be professional musicians and music teachers – they all are required to keep some kind on blog or online presence.

I also want to learn more about assessments using blogging and educational technologies that I can adapt for the music classroom. In my band classes we currently use blogging every week to reflect on our rehearsals and progress as we develop our repertoire. I also use Juno for online testing (great for music tests with multimedia), eMusicTheory.com, and NoteFlight (my AP Theory course loves this tool!). Blogging, Twitter, and Facebook (along with RSSGraffiti) is also a great tool for communicating to the masses. We use our band blog to communicate to parents, teachers, students, alumni, and “BHS Band Fans” of all ages. Twitter has become an invaluable tool for communicating quickly with all of my students instantly as they all subscribe to my tweets via their cell phones and receive text messages with every Tweet. We use AudioBoo to create short excerpts of our band in rehearsal so students can listen to themselves and critique their own work, without publishing full recordings of our repertoire online.

My ultimate goal for ETMOOC is to expand my professional learning network and reach more educators – hopefully even some serious music educators – to help develop these ideas in the music classroom. To learn more about me and my career as a music educator, please visit my About page on my blog, talkaboutmusic.edublogs.org.