Started teaching the first of my Backwards Designed units today (How to Blues- 5th grade) and I thought I’d reflect on the experience. Up ’til now I’ve just been puttering along, re-designing each “unit”(or rather set of fun, but otherwise meaningless, activities) that I have scrapped together and taught since the beginning of the year. [...]

This week I’m featuring Americans for the Arts, an organization advocating for Arts Education across the US. From the SchoolMusicMatters website: “Americans for the Arts claims to be the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts in America. With a 40-year record of service, they are dedicated to representing and serving local communities and [...]

Here is the debut post for my newest blog feature “Advocacy Thursday” where I will unveil a new article, website, or tidbit about Music or Education advocacy in my district, city, nation, or perhaps the world!
This week features a website sponsored by Music K-8 Magazine called SchoolMusicMatters.com. The site contains many helpful resources for music [...]

As I was up late tonight formatting all of my students’ Garage Band pieces into mp3’s to look nice and clean for my new inline Yahoo! Media Player, I came across this little gem for those who are looking to use Garage Band for the first time in the classroom or need to brush up [...]

So I have been in the process of uploading documents into my Media Gallery for future posting and came across a “paper” that I had done for my independent study in “Web Resources for the General Music Educator”. I designed this course in 2003 to fulfill my requirements for a music technology minor at CU-Boulder [...]

Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time when I get a “vacation” from my family life to travel to the Springs and network with people I only see once a year at most at the annual State Music Conference. This year I’m lucky to get to stay at the beautiful Broadmoor resort [...]

¿Se Habla Espanol? After 2 hours of tinkering, sweating and almost calling it quits, I finally have figured out how to add the Translation widget for Wordpress! Now you can simply click on the flags in the sidebar to translate the page into almost any language thanks to Google Translate.
I learned a couple of [...]

Today we started the third 6-week rotation cycle and I have decided to ramp up the keyboard lab in anticipation of the VH1 folks coming from NY in 2 weeks. I’m nervous that the kids won’t be ready to show anything at that point, but I think they are coming to see my teaching anyway. [...]