Music for Teachers

Welcome to the ‘Music for Teachers’ blog. The ‘Music for Teachers’ website is at www.m4t.org

I have been contacted by the company Legacy Productions who have made a new software program to help musicians of all levels to learn letters on all staves as well as on piano and guitar. The program is ’shareware’ and called “Noteable” and you can try out a demo version of it at www.noteableflashcards.com. 

I’ve had a quick look at it and found that I have a disturbingly slow reaction time when using a mouse! The shareware is free for 15 sessions for evaluation purposes. 

Let me know what you think via the blog

I have made a career doing things that weren’t even invented when I graduated from high school 40 years ago. It will be the same for today’s graduates, only on a sharply accelerating timeline. Much of what I learned in the classroom is obsolete or, at best, only marginally useful. What has made a difference in my life has been the ability to learn as I go, to adapt to new ideas, to have the courage to take risks, and to feel confident I will be able to perform and successfully meet the challenges of new situations. These skills I learned through participation in band and drama. - Fred Behning retired from IBM Corporation after a 32-year career that included assignments in systems engineering, product development, management, and customer technology briefings, and is still an IBM consultant. A life-long musician, Fred plays oboe and English horn in the Williamson County Symphony Orchestra and the Austin Symphonic Band.

This extract has been reproduced from the website of an American Music Association - The National Association for Music Education

I have long enjoyed the inexpensive and very broad selection of music available from the Naxos label.  The Naxos site has many useful features - try the music and movies listing.

Try this online glossary to support music groups from KS2 level and onwards.

If your students are interesting in games and composition, why not encourage them to combine the two and create music for Microsoft Xbox.

See the link to find out how you can record a soundtrack for forthcoming games.

Let us know if your students submit material …

Rock IT is a competition for school bands in the UK and Europe.
Registration is required via the rockit2007.org.uk website.

You can then submit a video of your band performing an original song.

If you get through the regional heats which will mostly be run via video conferencing you will be invited to the grand national final in Birmingham.

Please let us know of entries from your school by commenting on the blog.

Following recent work at the Sir John Talbot School and Technology College, colleagues might find the following summary very useful of the main characteristics of Assessment for Learning - link

As a result of some work I’ve recently undertaken with a primary school, it reminds me that I placed some time ago on the website a series of ideas for getting started to support clarity of learning objective when teaching composition. While these starters are not fully formed lessons they may be none the less useful for teachers who are lesson clear about the direction to take to support composition. Although the National Curriculum (for music) has been around for nearly 10 years I think the area of composition is very much disregarded, while the national debate centres on vocal work.

Feel free to contact me for further help with composition.

Please draw your KS4 student’s attention to the revision materials on the BBC website at the following link