Music Education Resources

I guess I'm on a music education kick. Earlier today I posted a link to a list of classic Jazz performances. Another great place to find educational materials about jazz and blues is the NPR Jazz and Blues page where visitors will find recordings, biographies or musicians, and streaming jazz radio stations.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has a fantastic website designed specifically for students. The DSO features interactive activities for students to learn about the instruments in an orchestra, the history of orchestral music, and basic music theory. The highlight of the DSO website is Beethoven's Baseball in which students play a three inning baseball game using composers as players.

Classic Jazz Videos and More

Open Culture an arts and culture website that I've written about in the past has posted a list of 50 Great Arts Videos. The list was actually compiled by the Guardian and is a nice supplement to Open Culture's list of 70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube. On the Guardian's list of videos visitors will find a great collection of Jazz performances as well theatrical performances. I've embedded below a video of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.


Applications for Education
Both the Great Arts Videos and 70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube are useful, free ways to find classic music and theater performances to share with fine arts students. For those you working in schools that block YouTube, I recommend installing Miro or using Zamzar to save the video locally if have a laptop to use at home.

Surf Docs - Find Videos and Related Slide Shows

I came across Surf Docs because my slide show "Impress Your Boss With Web 2.0" was embedded on it. Surf Docs is a mash-up of Slide Share and YouTube. They way that Surf Docs works is, you enter a search term and Surf Docs will find slide shows from Slide Share and videos from YouTube to match.

Applications for Education
Surf Docs could be useful for quickly finding a slide show and video to explain and demonstrate a concept or subject. Another way that Surf Docs could be used is to have students create presentations, submit them to Slide Share and then use Surf Docs to see what types of videos exist to complement their work.

2008 U.S. Presidential Election Maps and More

Like many news websites, Google has built a website dedicated to coverage of the 2008 election. On the Google 2008 U.S. Election page users will find all types of user generated content as well as stories from popular news outlets like CBS News. The part of the website that I like the most is the Elections '08 Map Gallery. In the map gallery users will find mash-ups of many types of data placed on a Google Map, for an example see the map below. The map below represents the campaign stops of both McCain and Obama.



Applications for Education
Google Maps mash-ups are useful for representing many types of data and information. Another of the election maps from Google illustrates where the largest campaign donations came from. A question to ask your students about that map would be something like, "what does the campaign map tell you about the party affiliation of the majority of people in area x or state x?"