Blog Post 7

As a music educator, one can take advantage of several online tools to integrate within the classroom. The following are a few examples:

Finale Music is a program designed to allow individuals to compose, arrange, notate, and print engraver-quality sheet music. There are five different products created by Finale: Finale, PrintMusic, SongBook, NotePad, and Songwriter. Educators can print and arrange repertoire for their classes without having to write it out by hand. In NotePad, a student composer can compose/notate a song and import it in a midi before emailing it to their teacher. Another great aspect of SongBook is that the students can program their personal repertoire into a tablet (iPad) in order to avoid carrying all of their music. 

In Symbaloo Education, an instructor can share various links with students and colleagues.  It has a great interface that one can use to organize your internet life using webmixes. One can select a bookmark that you want to save and click on a tile to add it to your webmix. There is even a web browser button called a bookmarker to allow fast adding of another tile to your Symbaloo mix. The only issue is that children under the age of 13 are prohibited from having their own account (personal information is required); however, young students can use webmixes from other users. 

An additional program called "I Heard That! Listening To Classical Music" by the Virginia Chamber Orchestra. The educational strategy actually incorporates peer teaching in the classroom. The streaming videos VCO uses has young students introducing and discussing classical composers to their audience. Through the videos, lesson plans,  and activity guides, students learn about Haydn, Bach, and Mozart (the big 3), comprehend the differences of major and minor scales/chords, and listen to recordings of various orchestrations.