This post contains a list of online resources that can help you and your students celebrate JAM.

Here is a very simple, but VERY important tip if you’d like to prolong the life of your powered speakers as long as possible: Last On - First Off (LOFO). What does that mean? Always turn your speakers on LAST in the sequence of powering up your computer and hardware devices, and always turn the off FIRST when powering down.

Have you ever stood up in front of you instrumental ensemble and said to yourself, “There MUST be a better way!!!” Tired of your students not practicing? Not prepared to play the repertoire you’ve so carefully picked out for them? Tired of standing up on the podium and working on the basics rather than actually making music? Tired of getting ready to leave for the day and seeing ALL of those instruments sitting in the instrument storage closet rather than with your students bringing them home to practice?

How many times have you had the pleasure of having single page PDFs - perhaps of a musical score - or forms that have been handed in by students - and you’ve thought to yourself “I really would love to put all of these PDFs in one file so that I could arrange them in the correct order!”. I have - MANY times. While PDFs are really great for a variety of reasons, they are different than word processing files. They are essentially images and can be a little difficult to deal with unless you have Adobe Acrobat Pro.

At the NAMM Show in Anaheim this year, there will be a recognition and celebration of one of the most unique things about the music industry - the 40th anniversary of the invention of MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface. While it may not sound like a big deal - it is. In a highly competitive industry, MIDI is one of the only things that ALL hardware and computer manufacturers have agreed on - adopting a single standard that is used by all MIDI enabled instruments, software and hardware. MIDI is everywhere.

Sometimes the only reason that you need to purchase a piece of software is ONE exercise or function. For me, it was the Tuning exercise in Auralia from Rising Software.

You can use Scratch to have students code their own interactive stories, animations, and games. In the process, they learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively . Educators are integrating Scratch across many different subject areas and age groups.

Last week I showed the entire process from recording a podcast in Soundtrap to posting the episode on SoundCloud and distributing the podcast on Spotify. This post includes a 32-minute video tutorial that I hope you find useful.

Back in 2016, I was invited to Washington DC to attend the launch of an amazing project, sponsored by the US Department of Education, the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, and the musedlab from the NYU Music Experience Design department. called Math, Science, Music. Essentially it is a collection of projects that focus on STEM integration, including projects by my dear friends Gena Greher from UMass Lowell and Alex Ruthmann from NYU. There are 11 projects altogether and they are all really well designed.

Join me for Connecticut Music Technology Day, a FREE in-person event designed specifically for K-12 music educators and administrators, sponsored by MusicFirst, Novation, and Focusrite!

In honor of Modest Mussorgsky’s birthday (born March 21, 1839 in Russia), here is a collection of. some of my favorite teaching resources for his most famous work, Pictures at an Exhibition. I hope you find them useful!

One of my all-time favorite DVDs that I used to show my students was Animusic. There were two editions of the DVDs - Animusic and Animusic 2 - and my students would sit there mesmerized at the incredible computer graphics that were magically synced to the really cool music for each track.

I am excited to announce that I will be heading back to Villanova University this summer to teach a music technology course on behalf of the University of the Arts Summer Music Studies Program on behalf of MusicFirst Summer Teacher Academy. It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve taught a week long summer course at Villanova and I’m thrilled to be back!

I recently did some research into microphone and interface solutions that are built specifically for podcasting and came across an amazing product line from Focusrite called the Vocaster. Wow. I immediately loved the design and simplicity of the two units and decided to take them for a test drive. I love them. In fact I love them so much, I decided to write a podcasting curriculum that featured them and started reselling them at MusicFirst. They are IDEAL for music education. Here’s why.

To help celebrate Pi Day (March 14th - 3/14), here is a very easy lesson plan to get your students composing in Noteflight using the first 10 digits of Pi. This lesson is one of thousands from the MusicFirst Classroom Content Library. If you are a MusicFirst Classroom subscriber, just add shared/view/lesson/8276# to the end of your site URL to access the full lesson plan.

The following is an excerpt from my chapter in the amazing publication, Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the Field, edited by Bryan Powell and Gareth Dylan Smith. If you’d like to read the full chapter, pick up a copy on Amazon.

I stumbled across one of the most incredible tools yesterday. If you’ve never heard of Lalal.ai, you can thank me later. Using the power of AI, this tool will extract the individual tracks (stems) from any audio file. You read that right.. Best part - you can try it out for free and if you love it as much as I do, it’s $30 to extract a LOT of audio.

Hyperscore is a music composition program designed to unlock students' creativity, regardless of their level of prior music experience. The software was what I consider “the missing link” between notation-based programs and digital audio workstations (DAWs).

To help celebrate Women’s History Month, here is a lesson plan about one of music’s most celebrated modern composers, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, from Iceland. This lesson plan is one of MANY from the MusicFirst Classroom Content Library. It is intended for students in middle and high school. You can get a free trial to access this lesson as well as tons of other content and software to explore everything MusicFirst has to offer.

March is Women’s History Month - celebrating, commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history. What better way to celebrate in your music classes than to create a podcast with your students?!?