Sharing is Caring – A review of “Music Teachers Blog”

Today I will be reviewing "Music Teacher's Blog", and discussing ways in which blogs can be useful but also a disadvantage to music teaching.

 

 

 

        To review this blog, I firstly ask, what is a blog? Summey suggests that a blog provides a platform for “information, ideas, tools and resources can be shared in an organised fashion” (Summey, 2013, p. 147). However, Summey goes on to say that, “The ability for readers to comment on blog posts only enhances the collaborative aspect of learning through blogging” (Summey, 2013, p. 147). I would challenge this assumption. One only needs to browse through a few comments on blog posts to unearth that there are a select few bloggers whose aim is to provide negative feedback rather than constructive criticism. However, when used effectively, blogging can be very useful indeed as a teaching tool.

        The Music Teachers Blog is a useful and interesting teaching community. It discusses and provides valuable advice and tips on different teaching strategies. directly linked to my specialist subject, music. One of the most frustrating things I have found during my time on the PCET course is trying (and failing) to describe music-specific teaching strategies in my assignments. For example, how do I describe the ways in which I aurally assess my classes? When I sing or play a tune back to the class for them to repeat, what can I call that teaching strategy? Being able to read this Music Teachers Blog has been a breath of fresh air in this respect, as the creators of the blog understand and describe the different teaching strategies related to music.  

        The topics covered in this blog are also highly current. For example there is a post about what teachers can do at the beginning of the New Year (2016) to keep their music lessons interesting. It suggests that including popular music such as Adele or Coldplay will provide a nice change for the students to learn things they hear in everyday life to make the lessons relevant to them.

        The Music Teachers Blog can also be useful to support my teaching as the tips and lesson resources can be applied to big classes or seminars as well as one-to-one teaching. This is relevant to my own practice as every week I tutor one-to-one in the Segelov Academy (link can be found on the right hand side of this blog) as well as large classes in Gower College.

         Music Teachers Blog is aesthetically pleasing to look at, providing useful videos and pictures with examples of the subject matter as well as other related blogs listed on the right hand side of the page. These other blogs have helpfully been categorised into connected topics so that the user can browse easily for their desired interest. These categorised topics are wonderfully varied, covering issues such as pricing, practicing techniques and teaching methods for popular and classical music.

        Though the Music Teachers Blog is interesting and useful to my own teaching practice, this blog is not without its flaws. Though it is not quite as open as Wikipedia, it has been written collaboratively by a large group of teachers acting as blog authors. This could be seen as an asset to the blog as the reader can gain a wide amount of information from a variety of collaborators all from the same blog. However, similarly to Wikipedia, the target audience for the blog sometimes gets lost as it covers quite a broad range teaching strategies and age groups. Consequently, not all of the content will be agreed upon by most classical tutors.

        The blog discusses both popular and classical methods of teaching. However, because the authors do not differentiate between these two methods, there are certain articles that one group of music teachers may not agree with. For example, one post advises music teachers to highlight the dynamics in yellow on the music score. However, most classical teachers will advise strongly against this as it does not teach the children to identify the dynamic markings on music that has not been highlighted. As not all the post content can be agreed upon by all music tutors, the blog authors should explicitly aim their posts to certain kinds of teachers / subject areas.

         It is clear that blogs can be useful to music teaching and the teaching profession. The “sharing is caring” attitude is at the heart of why blogs were created for academic purposes. However it is important to remember that blogs can be written by almost anyone and their content should be treated accordingly.


References

Summey, D. C., 2013. Developing Digital Literacies: A Framework for Professional Learning. London: Corwin, A Sage Company.