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The web is an excellent resource for music teachers who need free education materials for the elementary classroom. There are a number of sites that offers articles about music education and teaching strategies, lesson plans, classroom tools, children’s songs, fingerplays, and other helpful materials. Here are 15 sites to explore throughout the school year.

The web is an excellent resource for music teachers who need free education materials for the elementary classroom. There are a number of sites that offers articles about music education and teaching strategies, lesson plans, classroom tools, children’s songs, fingerplays, and other helpful materials. Here are 15 sites to explore throughout the school year

When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast. The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons. Moreover, when technology is used as a tool to support students in performing authentic tasks, the students are in the position of defining their goals, making design decisions, and evaluating their progress. The teacher's role changes as well. The teacher is no longer the center of attention as the dispenser of information, but rather plays the role of facilitator, setting project goals and providing guidelines and resources, moving from student to student or group to group, providing suggestions and support for student activity. As students work on their technology-supported products, the teacher rotates through the room, looking over shoulders, asking about the reasons for various design choices, and suggesting resources that might be used. (See example of teacher as coach.) Project-based work (such as the City Building Project and the Student-Run Manufacturing Company) and cooperative learning approaches prompt this change in roles, whether technology is used or not. However, tool uses of technology are highly compatible with this new teacher role, since they stimulate so much active mental work on the part of students. Moreover, when the venue for work is technology, the teacher often finds him or herself joined by many peer coaches--students who are technology savvy and eager to share their knowledge with others.

When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast. The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons. Moreover, when technology is used as a tool to support students in performing authentic tasks, the students are in the position of defining their goals, making design decisions, and evaluating their progress.

“I’ve read a lot of reviews about ‘Wii Music,’ and I think there’s a lot more depth to this program than people have initially given it credit for,” he says. “Wii Music” doesn’t ask players to match beats, like “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band.” Using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controller, players can experiment with more than 60 different virtual instruments ranging from bagpipes to ukulele. They can play mini-games such as "Handbell Harmony" and "Pitch Perfect." And they can jam or improvise as part of an ensemble. That’s the one feature that really hooked Krofchick, who says that younger kids can often be reluctant to improvise musically. “Children spend a lot of their classroom time following specific directions — what to read, what to do — and very little time … actually expressing themselves in the arts,” she says. “Some can be shy to come forward and actually sort of jump in and try something. “But if anything is presented to a child in the form of a game, it’s going to be much more student-friendly or kid-friendly,” she says. “For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a fear there.”

Smart and Getting Smarter- This site provides ideas to maximize SmartBoards as interactive hands-on, minds-on technology tools to support students as they demonstrate what they know in multiple ways. It provides an overiew and lesson activities and interactive sites in math, science, social studies, humanities, language arts and early learning.

Using Electronic Whiteboards in Your Classroom -This site provides ideas, lesson plans, and websites for using the SmartBoard in the classroom. This site is divided by content area.

The interdisciplinary nature of TED (a direction I’d like to see education go in general) would allow many of these clips to cross several of my categories, so it may be useful for you to scan the lists of other disciplines. Enjoy!

Bionic Teaching has used the same sheet to create a great MIT Exhibit on, as far as I can tell, all of the TED Talks.

Immediately following the release of the National Standards for Music Education in 1994, MENC--The National Association for Music Education released Opportunity-to-Learn Standards for Music Instruction as a guide to what schools should provide to help students achieve both the National Standards for Music Education in grades K-12 and the MENC prekindergarten music education standards. MENC recommends that states either adopt these opportunity-to-learn standards or use them as a basis for developing their own. The standards challenge all who are committed to high-quality music instruction to work together to improve the teaching and learning of music in the nation's schools. The writers of the opportunity-to-learn standards were well aware that new technologies have an impact on the ways schools deliver music instruction. Throughout the text of those standards, there are references to computers, software, MIDI equipment, CD-ROMs, and other resources that are important to the world of the music teacher, as well as essential to the world of music outside the classroom. In the years since the publication of the opportunity-to-learn standards, technologies useful for music education (as for all education) have grown more capable, more varied, simpler to use, and certainly more ubiquitous.