Sunday, March 6, 2011

EduTecher Reflection

A few good resources I ran across while browsing the EduTecher website were playmusic.org, brainpop.com/artsandmusic/, and kidsknowit.com

Playmusic.org is a fun animated site for kids where they can explore the musical instruments in the orchestra. Kids can learn about instruments, what they sound like, and learn about/contact musicians and composers. This would be great for younger students to use. It could be used in elementary or general music class, but I think what I would primarily use it for would be teaching students about the different instruments and what they're like. 

Brainpop.com/artsandmusic/ is a the arts and music page of the comprehensive site brainpop.com (which covers all the core subjects as well as health, engineering, and technology. It is free for educators, but it does cost upwards of $70 a year for kids or entire schools to get access to it. The arts and music page has information on the instruments as well as singing and audio recording. The educators page includes lesson plans (sorted by content and age group), educator blogs, standards (look up by state and content), lists of training sessions and webinars, and a featured resource of the day. The things that would be most useful to me would be the lesson plans and featured resources. If I ever had to teach a virtual class, this is something I might have my students actually purchase (they have rates for virtual classrooms and other situations also). 

Kidsknowit.com is a website that happens to have a huge collection of educational songs (among other teaching resources). There are no music-for-the-sake-of-music songs, but there are hundreds of cross-curricular songs. A lot of these songs would coincide perfectly with things that elementary school students learn in their core classes. The only downside to this site is that you may not be able to download the songs, and you won't be able to get an accompaniment part if you want to perform the song at a concert. You would have to play the song itself as accompaniment or just have your kids sing a capella. 

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