Digital Musicking

With the popularity of the movie "Amadeus", there is a bit of misconception about the famous classical composer. This academic blogpost does a fair amount to parse fact from fiction, and can be a nice supplemental resource for music history syllabi.

This software is a easy way for students to make, create, compose, their own music. The purpose of this source would be to help student come up with creative ways to make music, using a famous interface call Ableton push. It makes it easy for the composer to create loops, and other things using this software. It comes with many features, like effects, vocals, built in instruments, and loops. There is more than enough tools for the composer to use, to create different types of music.

This site has games made to help build aural solfege skills. This is great for music students to practice ear training and build scales.

This website has helped me organize my instrumentation for my beginners. Knowing retention rates and how to get a better ensemble sound has been very benifitial

The site provides music terminology practice in a matching game. This source is suitable for music students of any age to reinforce the definitions of music vocabulary.

This resource provides trumpet scales and etudes organized by key. They help to teach scales, arpeggios, technical facility, slurring, and more.

Especially for private instructors like myself, access to core music standards is not always readily available, or exactly the same as state standards. For fellow WI instructors, it is important to stay abreast of changes made to the Standards for Music. This site directly links to the government page on the topic.

This is a nice supplemental resource to give to students to aid them in sight-reading. It contains a number of musical exercises that inculcate the practice.

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

This resource provides free online music flashcards to use with students. They help to teach note reading, key signatures, triads, and more.

This website provides useful resources for both students and teachers in the realm of audiation. For students, it provides helpful practice of intervals, chords, scales, and the like to train one's inner-ear. For teachers, it provides a number of pedagogical techniques and classroom exercises to try.

This is the website for the app Complete Ear Trainer. It is an aural skills development app that is completely free to use and allows educators to complete custom lessons and groups for their students. It is available of Android, iOS, and Amazon platforms.

This set of music books is completely free and in PDF format. In addition to that, there are videos that you can show in class or have your students view on their own at home. This is a great resource for a beginning band program that does not have a large budget. All resources are free to use, and it is based in solfege so it is easier to teach a whole room of beginners on different instruments.

This website has free arrangements of band music, written with beginning bands and band programs with low budgets in mind. Pieces can be downloaded as PDFs and you can download the condensed score, as well as individual parts for all of the instruments. Pieces are rated so it is easy to find music that will work for your students.

This blog is great for seeing what other band directors are up to. This post specifically is an introduction to Google Classroom. It outlines what Google Classroom is and how it can be utilized within the music classroom. As someone who uses Google Classroom, I highly recommend it.

Google Classroom is a fantastic way to manage your classroom, engage students, and have assignments posted and submitted without any papers being lost. A lot of music teachers have no idea where to start with this software. This article posted by NAfME details four ways to integrate Google Classroom into your music classroom.

Hookpad is an interesting piece of software. While it does involve digital notation, it focuses more on notating chords and chord progressions and does so by providing the user options to use standard and non-standard notation. I love using Hookpad when my students are doing songwriting on the ukulele. It is easy for them to play the chords on the ukulele, then input them into Hookpad by selecting the chord symbols. They can then go in an add melodies as well.

Crocodile River Music is a group based in Worcester, MA, the city where I teach. They provide students with a chance to not only listen to, but also to take part in a world music experience. They run programs to come into schools and teach about music from Africa, while also having students come up and try some of the instruments.