Last week my school district made what I’m sure was a tough decision: we will start the year virtually. While I know there are many viewpoints on this subject, I’m not here to debate them, I feel relieved that I can now make plans for this upcoming, unprecedented, school year. A lot of the content…
One of my favorite things in the summer is to catch up on all the books I purchased during the school year and didn’t have time to read. I buy them with the best intentions, but it will often take weeks or even months to finish reading one book. In March, right before the world…
With the quick transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, many music educators found themselves needing a “crash course” in technology. Being savvy, forward-thinking educators, they made it happen one Google search, Seesaw post, and virtual classroom at a time. Now that we’ve most returned to the classrooms and have had some time to…
I’ve always enjoyed creating digital resources, and now, teaching remotely, it is even more important. While this post isn’t directly teaching related, hopefully it will be useful when creating things for your classes. The following four tools are ones that I can’t live without when it comes to designing digital media. In fact, I imagine…
Over the last few weeks I’ve said several times that trying to recreate our classrooms while distance learning isn’t where we should put our energy. The two aren’t the same, especially considering the fact that this isn’t exactly “distance learning” – it’s attempting education during a pandemic. Instead, we should Focus on What We Can…
In my last blog post, Focus on What We Can Do, I discussed how during distance learning we cannot try to replicate everything we did in our classrooms. It’s not the same and we can’t try to make it that way. Instead, by focusing on what we can do now, there are numerous ways we…
Many of us have been in this new “distance learning” phase for a few weeks now – or as A.J. Juliani calls it “emergency remote learning.” Whatever term you use, we’re discovering that it’s not the same. We can’t replicate what happens in our classrooms online. And that’s ok. I think instead we need to…
This is another unintended, yet timely post about technology tools I’ve been using recently. Last time I wrote about using Flipgrid to maintain community in music classes. This post is also about Flipgrid, but how teachers can use it to easily create video content when suddenly faced with teaching digitally. Recently I’ve had the need…
While this is technically the fourth in the series of short posts about technology tools, it wasn’t my intended topic for the week! However, given the current events and everything going on with #COVID19, this seems to be the most relevant. Teaching in a brand new school this year and starting a band program from…
Welcome to the second in a series of short posts about technology tools I have been using recently! Last week I wrote about using Google Keep to organize conference resources. This week I’ll introduce you to my new favorite curation tools, Wakelet. I first learned about Wakelet about a year ago. In its simplest form,…