Alternative title: “Thank you big multinational conglomerate for making me a better teacher”
Plenty of people are blogging about how useful Twitter can be. Some talk about the support it lends, some about the networking, some about the potential for its use in the classroom (how they convince SLT of that, I’d love to know) and a few mention the amazing resources that they find on there. Today I’m blogging about those resources.
I’ve trawled the internet for resources even when I was an unqualified teacher. There were always a few useful things to find that had been put together by some very insightful teachers and all that was needed was to adapt them to suit the needs of whatever school I was at. Increasingly, however, I’m finding that I only need to have a look at what’s been made available to the typical consumer or aspiring musicians. Some of the resources that have been created to support the grass roots music industry are actually very useful in the classroom and they have the added benefit of showing the pupils that there really is an industry out there that they can aspire to work in.
Even better is that the organisations that create them need people to know about these resources to justify the expense of creating them. This is the real plus of this way of looking at things. For a variety of reasons (primarily time would be my main guess) many Music teachers don’t share their resources with the wider community – there’s no blame and no shame in that but it does mean that some of the best resources never make it into the wider community. Resources from newspapers, record labels, collection agencies, etc are created to be shared. They still have to be adapted (and checked for bias) but it does mean some really high quality stuff gets out there (especially the video resources). To get to all this stuff, all you need to do is follow a few industry types on Twitter – start with the bigwigs (labels, newspapers’ music sections, the PRS) and develop it from there.
I’ll sign off with that but feel free to comment and suggest people to follow that have provided you with some resources that found their way into your classroom.