As an elementary music teacher in my twenty-third year of teaching, I have witnessed a huge growth in the use of media and technology in the music classroom. When comparing today’s technologies to those of years past (the tuning fork, ditto-mastered song sheets, scratchy vinyl records on mono turntables), it’s clear that we are living in an exciting time to teach music. For so many of us, the technologies seem to change faster than we can catch up with the learning curve of the previous technology. And it can be difficult to choose a technology worth the investment of time and resources without any guarantee that it will still be in vogue three years down the road. One recent development that has had a huge impact on my teaching is the ability to record each of my 600+ students using the MP3 format. The focus of this post is using MP3 recordings during classroom music time as an authentic assessment tool for each of your students. I will also cover a variety of great teaching resources for music and content-area classrooms. Throughout the month, your comments may direct us to additional media and technology tools that enhance teaching and learning in the elementary music classroom.

Last year I posted an article here at Media Infusion called “4 Weeks to a Flatter You.” The theme of the post was that the world is indeed becoming smaller as Thomas Friedman suggested in The World is Flat, and I provided a 4-week regimen to help teachers prepare themselves with skills necessary for constructing 21st Century classrooms. This year, I’d like to follow up that article on “Web 2.0 Self-improvement” with tools for “Web 2.0 Us-improvement.” I’ve put together another 4-week course to help us move further along the journey. We’ll examine the idea of how — because of the Internet — culture (and business) is changing through crowdsourcing and how we can take advantage of this phenomenon to transform and democratize our classrooms.