Thomas J. West Music

I do not follow many bloggers regularly, but Seth Godin is one of them. In his recent e-newsletter from The Domino Project, Godin tells the story of Amanda Palmer, a musician who built her audience one listener at a time, one burnt CD at a time, all on the internet. Her Twitter ...

Image: SoundCloud.com

Looking for a way to use online tools and social media in your music classroom? You can't get much easier or more effective than incorporating SoundCloud into your curriculum. SoundCloud is social networking for recorded sounds. Accounts are free and ...

I have been offering live private music lessons via webcam since 2008. Over that course of time, the online environment has changed dramatically thanks to social media advances. Despite these trends, my student roster continues to be sporadic and modest in size. I had attributed that primarily to the notion that online lessons had ...

As my regular readers are aware, I teach at a unique school. It is a performing and fine arts center that is a program offering of a K-12 cyber charter school. Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School currently has about 2,300 students statewide. They receive their education on school provided PC's using primarily Moodle,...

I've been formally offering private online webcam music lessons since 2008. I offer lessons from beginner to advanced on any band or orchestra instrument, piano, and voice, and beginner to intermediate on guitar. The lessons are typically delivered over Skype, although I have delivered lessons using Tinychat and Google Plus Hangouts. I have had students from across the US and two European students.

While many of us in the U.S. enjoyed the Colmbus Day holiday yesterday, the folks behind the scenes in Tokyo for Theta Music Trainer were rolling out a big update package. Five new games, new training courses, and inproved...

In this era of policy-makers demanding accountability in our public education system, high-stakes testing (student test outcomes tied directly to school funding sources), and teacher accountability, the performing and fine arts are pushed even further to the side than ever. Despite efforts to demonstrate the value of perform...

My school has a professional development plan that I particularly enjoy. Based on the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching, our faculty sets professional development goals for themselves for each marking period and reports on them to department chairs. The goals can be on...