During Module 3 of the Connected Educators course, I have become more and more interested in the idea of blogging as a means to creating a home base for materials/curriculum/ideas that will help other teachers in their classroom and also organize my thoughts and processes. Before writing this post, I decided to put up my first blog post about teaching the basics of beginner jazz improvisation. I spent a significant amount of time going through materials I already had, organizing them and putting the finishing touches on some things I've been meaning to finish/change for awhile now. This will directly affect my students because they will obviously benefit from the updates that were made (some of which I have been meaning to make for months or years!) But even more importantly, I took the opportunity to create some new tools - new play-along recordings, some small JPGs of music materials that were converted from PDFs and cut down to show musical concepts, and other things, that will become useful in my Google Classroom for the kids, my website and also potential social media posts. I have also taken this first blog post and submitted it to various music educator Facebook pages. (1 of which denied the post, because it was "self-promoting" and self-promotion blogs posts can only be posted on Thursdays.. I find that annoying, but I guess there is a reason. I am only annoyed because I didn't write it to be self promoting, i wrote it and shared it to help the 60,000 music teachers in that Facebook group!) I learned through this that it seems as though some of these avenues of sharing have rules and guidelines that need to be carefully followed. I know now that I will wait for Thursdays to post in that group, anything related to this new blog.
In a more roundabout and also very specific way, this module and my newfound interest in music education material blogging will be really beneficial for a small but important group of people - future music teachers! Through the years, I have had student teachers, college student observers and also high school students who had plans of going into music education in college who would hugely benefit from materials like this. Additionally, these organized and detailed explanations could become great resources for my current Middle & High School students who want to dive deeper into the material and would like to see all of the materials organized in one place.
I have blogged about random things before such as pizza reviews and my personal weight loss journey. In the back of my mind, I know that I enjoy writing. I never thought about doing something like this for the benefit of my fellow music educators. When I was writing the post, I felt pretty excited about the possibility of sharing something with others and making their lives just a little bit easier so they would not have to reinvent the wheel and they could potentially just use my materials. For some, I hope that the materials and information posted will motivate them to take a chance and try something new in their own classes. Even if one person uses it, that's probably at least 20 students who will benefit from it! The possibilities are endless when we are willing to share and help each other.
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