Back from ISME 2006!
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006Phew… Travelling half way around the globe to Malaysia was a blast, but now I’m pretty exhausted. If any of you have the chance to attend an ISME conference, do it. Such a great time and so many great workshops and sessions.
Of course, I found out about some more cool tools for the classrooom to share with you:
1. Sound Junction (www.soundjunction.org). This is a very cool interactive music learning, creating, and sharing website created in the UK. You and your students can sign up for free, explore musical styles and genres, and compose and share music.
2. YackPack (www.yackpack.com). This website allows you to create a virtual friend network online and communicate via voice messages. One of the limitations of blogging that my students talked about was that the communication was only text-based. They wanted audio and video-based communication. Well, now with the Web 2.0 it is possible.
My trip to ISME also led to a number of exciting things to come in the next year. Be on the lookout for a new book called Embedding music technology in secondary schools edited by John Finney and Pam Burnard from Continuum Press. I have been invited to write a chapter on using collaborative online tools like blogs, podcasts, and wikis in secondary music classes for this book. Look for it in Spring 2007.
