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Meeting of practice goals more important than just measuring time spent

A collection of pop songs that work well for school ensembles: mostly 3 or 4 chords

This page includes links to each of the individual Music Theory pages I've created in PDF form. This is a work in progress; I am writing new ones regularly and fixing errors and omissions on existing ones as I find them. If you find them useful for your theory studies, you are welcome to use them, and if you find errors or have suggestions, I invite you to contact me. Enjoy! These pages are available for free under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

We are Crossref, a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publishing working to make content easy to find, link, cite and assess. We do it in five ways: rallying the community; tagging the metadata; running a shared infrastructure; playing with new technology; and making tools and services to improve research communications.

Mix magazine is a great resource for all of the latest news related to the audio technology world. There are articles discussing the latest technologies being released, as well deep dives into the recording studios of industry professionals who have worked on world renown albums.

This is similar to the website Choralia in that it offers part rehearsal tracks for choral music, but this website is devoted to large masterworks. This would be best for choirs who need to learn these works of parts thereof for festivals or competitions.

Choralia offers part rehearsal tracks for a wide selection of choral repertoire. Most of it is Baroque/Classical/Romantic era rep, but there is a good selection of newer works as well (Gjeilo, Lauridsen, Rutter). Sound quality is a little funky, but they do the job.

This collection of videos is a great resource to use during general music classes when introducing instruments of the orchestra. This is a great way to get students interested in the different instrument families. It offers a great deal of information on the instrument, how it works, and even gives students examples of how to create their own instrument using found objects.

This is a discussion by New York Times columnist, David Brooks, and Kathy Fletcher, and the director of Turnaround Arts Initiative about the important work that Turnaround Arts does through the strategic use of the arts. The discussion talks about how music facilitates brain development, why certain things in music leave people fascinated, and what magic music brings to emotion. The discussion also unfolds how the arts, and music education in particular opens the student's mind to memorisation. David Brooks says "Students understand better when topics are introduced through music". I agree with that because most students become more alert when a topic is introduced through song and it fosters the interest of students. Therefore we need arts to succeed in education. A lot of artists came from struggling backgrounds so when they talk to children that would like to succeed in the music world but are frightened that they'll never make it, they tell them "I know what you are going through but you can make it". This encourages those children to push on and excel in the arts. Kathy Fletcher says music boosts critical thinking and confidence which is ideal for students and they end up excelling in all other fields. The arts connect us all through music in a way that music created is shared all around the world. Partnerships are created to perform music and people come together to listen to music. This makes us one.

Remember when Finale used to be able to import pdf files? PlayScore 2 is a great work-around. Music scanning software that includes the ability to export as a MusicXML file or MIDI file which can then be imported into programs such as Finale, Sibelius, to be edited, transposed, or re-arranged. ALSO - this is a great tech blog to follow / subscribe to.

Music K8 is a publication company that provides resources (physical and digital) for elementary/general music teachers. Most of the musical content is organized and packaged around various themes, such as seasons or holidays. There is also a magazine (for teachers) that is published quarterly containing a variety of repertoire and high quality mp3 accompaniment tracks. Individual songs can also be previewed and purchased digitally.

This website is used to help me find new repertoire to work on with my students. Teaching concepts through pieces of music is important even at the younger level. This resource helps me find music for all ages in my school.

A software tool to create visual 'bubble' maps representing the musical form of user provided audio files in mp3, wav, or m4a formats. This is the software that I reviewed for Module 5, and it just works for the purpose it was created. Educational and at the same time just plain fun to play around with!

The purpose of this website is to find songs to use in the elementary music room with ukulele tabs. A ukulele is much easier to work with when dealing with young students and this website provides many song resources with the ukulele tab. The chords can also be transposed to make playing them easier. The current song that is linked is a favorite of my Kindergarten students.

I use this video to teach tempo with my 1st graders. It also helps them work on prepositions and classroom teachers will appreciate the help!

Teachers pay teachers is user content for other users to use. For a small fee (or free in many cases!), an educator could find lessons, activities, resources, or curriculum that would work well for their specific teaching situation. For a teacher with ideas and resources looking to make a little bit of extra money, they could put up their own content for others to buy.

This website introduces students to instruments of the orchestra, and allows students to create in the music lab. This would work well with elementary students.

The Kidzone by the New York Philharmonic is an interactive website for children to use to learn primarily about instruments, composers, and famous musicians. It includes games, videos, audio recordings, and text. Students can interact with games that allow them to match rhythms, sort instruments into families, build an instrument, create a graphic-based composition, and match instruments and composers. There is also information about children's concerts.

This is an awesome resource that's student-friendly and focuses on instruments of the orchestra, as well as composers. It creates a strong connection between concept and real-world scenarios. The website is designed around the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There are engaging and interactive games and lessons for students to learn about the orchestra and test their knowledge.

Very engaging and visually appealing website from the New York Philharmonic. Unfortunately many of the links would not work; however, one really cool feature is that there are recordings of symphony performances that can be viewed in a classroom. Much better quality of video than many available videos on YouTube.

This website offers a multitude of resources designed for music-making. This specific organization is devoted to offering musical programs to students who are in the 80% of the population that are not involved in performing ensembles. It offers curriculum, lesson plans, and interactive activities for guitar, piano, drums, bass, ukulele, composition, voice and more. There are free PDF songbooks and lesson plans that are connected to the program, that are extremely helpful towards teacher and student interest. The best part of the program is that the majority of the music is examples that students know already - a lot of pop, rock, and even hip-hop. It connects the bridge between traditional musical concepts with music of today.

Little Kids Rock has a multitude of resources for creating a modern band in your classroom. There are songs loaded on the website that include tab for ukulele, guitar, and bass. There are also drum set patterns included. This website serves to expose educators and students modern band and provides lesson plans to go along with the popular songs. Little Kids Rock also provides workshops on how to effectively teach a modern band program.

This website offers many lessons for instruments that students may be interested in playing (piano, guitar, songwriting, drums,etc). The website offers video lessons as well as current play-along songs for students to put their newly learned skills to work.

The American String Teachers Association is filled with helpful resources for string teachers specifically. The "teaching resources" page includes tips for working on string specific content such as bowing technique and left and right hand position.

This website provides free blank sheet music for any ensemble you could ever need.  This is perfect for your beginning composers.  You never have to buy sheet music again! 

This is a quick way of printing out sheet music for students. If students want to print out sheet music at home, they can use this website. This helps encourage students to work on compositional skills. It has different pre-sets for different instruments.