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Blog Post by Ryan Sargent on how to effectively lesson plan as a music teacher. Ryan gives tips on standards, objectives and assessment music teachers can use to become more effective lesson planners.

This website was created by Jon F. Mueller, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at North Central College in Illinois. Mueller discusses the differences between traditional assessment and authentic assessment - two different concepts that have different long-term goals and outcomes for students. Mueller, a strong advocate for authentic assessment, provides various examples to illustrate the pros and cons of both methods of assessment at different levels and fields of education, while providing data and research to support his stance. Mueller also provides information and structured examples on how educators can incorporate authentic assessment (in many forms) in their classrooms.

A website to help create and utilize musical assessments. A teacher can learn about new assessments, compare state and national music standards, and learn about the most up-to-date musical research.

This site provides several useful resources for educators. It is an authentic assessment toolbox filled with tips to help teachers create rubrics, include standards in their assignments, and examples of assessments to use.

A blog from the Harmony Road site which provides several tips for teaching a group piano course.

This website provides tips for starting an iPad ensemble at a school. This resource deals with finding ways to musically educate "the other 80%" of school students.

Make moments matter is a blog run by an elementary music teacher. His blog focuses on classroom ideas, decoration, and lesson ideas. This website could be a great resource for any music teacher. Novice teachers could benefit from having a range of ideas and helpful tips available to them. Also, veteran teachers could find some new ideas to incorporate into the classroom form lesson to decorations. The blog posts on the website are thoughtful and meant to be advice to those that chose to read them.

This resource provides piano teachers with tips about how to help students begin to improvise.

Best Practices for Children's Choir is a podcast with Matthew Parker discussing his best practices when working with a children's choir. The discussion content ranges from choosing music to engaging in warm-ups. Matthew also shares his favorite octavos, composers/arrangers, warm-ups, and tips when choosing music. This is very useful information and a great resource to use when working with your elementary and/or middle school choir.

Podcast and synopsis of best practices for children's choir. I want to reference this if the world works my way and places me in an elementary school next year.

As a bassoon player I often have people approach me about how I can play such an impossible instrument and how do I recruit? This article is short but has many good thoughts on how to recruit and have success in starting a double reed student. The main sections is how to garner interest to get students to play the instrument, the personality of a double reed player, and how to help students be successful once they've started playing a double reed. There are very helpful links to reed care also.

This site provides great resources for recruiting students and practice tips. The blog provides good ideas for rehearsing beginning bands. This site addresses topics such as best instrument equipment and rehearsal techniques

Exchange ideas with other teachers for using SmartMusic at their blog.

SmartMusic blog with useful articles.  Studio, ensemble, lesson, etc

The Smartmusic Blog, also called the Music Educators Blog is a blog based extension of www.smartmusic.com. The purpose of the blog is to give tips on many aspects of music education that teachers can use in the classroom, not just for information on the Smartmusic program. The blogs are written by music educators as well as Makemusic staff members. Teachers can use this website as their own personal professional development or as a ways to show students what is available in Smartmusic.

Many students are left-handed and in a Ukulele program, this may present a challenge for the teacher. In this blog post, Bernadette discusses strategies for teaching left-handed Ukulele students as well as tips for instrument stringing/tuning.

The U.S. Army Field Band has a Youtube channel with a number of resources for students and educators. There are collections of resource videos for each instrument that include instruction on fundamentals, as well as tips and tricks. There are also videos of performances and instrument repair techniques.

This is an excellent blog post detailing the steps for utilizing and more specifically creating a Kahoot game. Kahoot can be used for reviewing test questions, instrument families, pitch names, or rhythmic examples. This article details tips and tricks for creating a game for your class.

Orcehstralbassoon.com is a website that answers a plethora of questions about the bassoon. The bassoon is an instrument that several band directors lack in their own ensembles. When they do have them, many of them do no know how to answer pertinent questions about how to properly play it. This website offers recordings, orchestral excerpts, fingering charts, pedagogical methods, history, and tips on reed making. This is an extremely valuable site for the school band director or orchestral director that wishes to promote good double reed players in their ensemble.

This website is a great resource for K-5 music.  There are jokes, games, and information regarding famous composers, including recordings of famous pieces of music.  This can be used by a classroom of kids in a computer lab, or by a teacher for lesson planning.

Classics for Kids is a resources for teachers, parents, and children. It provides lesson plans, music games and interactive links, a podcast, tips for parents, and information about composers, instruments, and music history. The lesson plans (written by my former music education professor, Dr. Kay Edwards) are standards-based and incorporate elements of Orff, Kodaly, and Dalcroze.

This website is for elementary/general music education. It is a resources for lesson plans on composers, music theory, and music listening.

This site provides a history of jazz music and its function. It provides sound clips, video clips of jazz musicians, and helpful tips and information relating to jazz music in America.

This website, from the National Association for Music Education, highlights the "Top Most Read Music Education Blogs of 2016." The blogs pertain to various topics including the benefits of the arts, lesson planning, concert etiquette, music technology, and classroom management.

The purpose if this site it to create easy access to the most read blogs of 2016 in one location. Topics such as: What Students Have to Gain From the Arts, Effective Lesson Planning for the Secondary Choral Director, 3 Reasons Music and Arts Education is a Shining Light, Music Teacher Resumes Revisited: Planning, Creating, and Maintaining, Ten Tips to Transform a Flutist into a Piccoloist, Teaching Concert Etiquette, How to Teach Your Students the Attention They Need to Succeed...etc. are explored. All these topic are related to student success in the music classroom.

Here is a wonderful music education podcast. There are a number of important topics discussed in this podcast such as planning, reflecting, rehearsal strategies, and student leadership. This is a great resource for beginning and experienced music teachers alike.

This blog compared similarities between physical therapy and teaching music. It was interesting to read the list of fifteen items which are shared between the two very different topics. The list started with hydrating and described the importance of drinking plenty of water after a strenuous exercise as well as when practicing music. My favorite parts are the article included the idea of practicing slower as well as practicing for shorter periods of times more often. I think those are great teaching tips to help our students improve. So often we as musicians and teachers just want to do everything in the fastest way possible. We also spend so much of our time staying busy with life that we seem to squeeze all of our practicing into one time rather than little by little.

This is a great article about how to keep students interest in music through music technology. The article also gives tips for lessons that connects music technology with the National Music Standards.

Article on the use of technology in music ed as related to NAfME standards

Article on the use of technology in music ed as related to NAfME standards