Digital Musicking

Songfacts is a website that enables educators and students to learn the historical background of artists and their songs. There is a search engine that allows for an easy look-up of any artist, and accompanying this search is a timeline of major events, a brief history of the artist's life, and insight that the general public may not know about the artist. There is also research and insight about individual songs that the artist released or collaborated on. Songfacts can be a great resource to give more context about music that students are learning to in and out of class. It can engage students in listening to music more actively if they are intrigued about the artist's life, struggles, achievements, vision, and motivation for creation.

This site helps build rubrics used for assessments.  You can design your own rubrics for playing tests, performances and projects.

This is a website that links to various rubric-creating formats, designed to save educators time and effort in making more visually-appealing assessment tools. There is a brief article that discusses the benefits of implementing a rubric in assessment, and there are multiple links to other articles that discuss the pros and cons of utilizing rubrics at various levels of education. Within the initial article are 25 different formats, some more topic-specific than others, to generate rubrics with pictures and descriptions. It is easy to use and much more efficient than creating a rubric from scratch.

This website offers worksheets, games, and tutorial videos for teachers to use with their younger piano students (K-6 to) to enhance student engagement and understanding. Some basic theory is taught in the form of colorful dittos for students, and other theory or technique is taught by game-based worksheets. There are a number of resources to accommodate major holidays and calendar events as well. There are many link that branch off into different other sites to facilitate the sharing of ideas with other educators. Videos are also included to demonstrate how various games and lessons should be structured for maximum efficiency.

This is the Dallas Symphony's kids page. They have great videos and resources about the instruments of the orchestra and composers. There are lesson plans available as well. This is probably geared more toward younger students.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra's purpose for creating this site is to compile a variety of interactive games and resources for kids to access and explore orchestral instrumentation and sound. The games and interactive information is engaging and informative, especially for the young general music student as well as beginning instrumentalists.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has compiled a website for teachers and students. The materials from this site will enhance certain musical concepts being taught in class to increase students' levels of engagement. There are videos and songs to enhance music lessons, as well as ideas and materials for lesson plans. The DSO page also provides multiple resources and links to other educational outlets for students in elementary school, as well as accompanying teacher resources and activities for their students.

This is a fun listening game in the form of Tetris. This game is designed to enhance the audiation skills in students by helping them identify instruments based on their unique sounds. There are three levels of difficulty for students to play. Each instrument that descends is accompanied by its innate musical sound. In the first level, students must match instruments according to their family. In the second level, students must match instruments with identical instruments. On the third level, the most challenging level, students must match instruments with identical instruments, but the icon of each instrument is blacked out. In other words, students must rely solely on their ears to hear and categorize each instrument's unique sound.

Quia enables educators to create quizzes quickly and effectively. The website walks you through the quiz-making process, and it is easy to use. Questions can take the form of true/false, multiple choice, multiple answers, short answer responses, essay, and several others. In addition, multimedia capabilities are available to enhance quiz questions. Teachers can add a music clip or an image to illustrate or become the focal point of a question. Questions can be randomized for multiple variations of quizzes, and feedback can be left for students for each question.

A TED talk by Jody Espina, saxophonist and industry professional who founded JodyJazz Inc. Jody talks about creativity in all walks of life, and that the fear of taking risks and learning from our mistakes are important to growing as musicians and individuals.

Users can search by element in this folk song index to find specific songs for their needs. Songs have a traditional Kodaly analysis sheet music.

This is a YouTube channel for Kodaly-inspired teachers. All teaching videos are based off the book, Kodaly Today by Michael Houlahan and Philip Tacka

This is a podcast for elementary music teachers. It shares lesson ideas and teaching strategies for experienced and novice music teachers.

This is a podcast for elementary music teachers. It focus on teaching philosophies and how to effectively use a variety of teaching styles in the classroom.

This YouTube channel features video tutorials on various aspects of the music industry, including proper recording and mixing techniques. In addition, there are video masterclasses from the MixCon annual convention from professional audio engineers and mixing engineers.

This YouTube playlists features high quality videos discussing the fundamentals of each instrument, including tone production, articulation and other advanced techniques with demonstrations by professional musicians.

This is a nice colorful ear training game for melody recognition and sight reading. I think it would work well in middle school. I feel it might be a bit advanced for elementary.

This is a wonderful article on motivating middle school students and keeping them invested.

Here is another interesting talk by a current international bass player and how to teach music first before an instrument.

This is a page from the previous Songfact website. It talks about how a current artist sampled part of this piece. It is a good relevant general music discussion to illuminate how today's artists are influenced by what students might perceive as outdated and irrelevant artists to today's music.

This is a very interesting website. I wouldn't let my classes "roam free" during class but as a teacher resource, relevant songs could be brought up and discussed as a class. Students could submit a song request and the teacher could preview ahead of time the appropriateness of discussing it's history.

This is an interesting article on the effectiveness of music therapy. It points also points out how cost effective music therapy is compared to drug trials.

This is a very interesting article on teaching middle school general music. I have a class of 35. it is very hard to keep them engaged. I will also look into the book.