Thomas J. West Music

Last Monday, March 1st, 2010, I had the immense honor of being involved in the first Music Education Chat held on Twitter. It involved approximately 30 Twitter users (or more, there were some lurkers who didn't comment) at 8:00 PM E.S.T. for one hour. It began with a topic chosen by TwitPoll: “What are effective methods of assessment in a performance-based class?” The tweets came fast and furious, and the conversation touched on all of these great aspects of the topic:

• Assessing students in non-performance music classes (general music).
• How do you assess creativity?
• Using rubrics to assess performance.
• How many grade performing ensembles on attendance and participation only?
• Should elementary band and orchestra students receive a grade? Pass/fail?
• Does holding performing ensemble members to a standard a turn-off for their continued participation?
• The "sound before sight" approach to teaching music notation.
• Web 2.0 resources for music composition and general music.
• Using Moodle, blogs, and wikis for collaborative learning.
• How do you assess jazz improvisation?
• Can you teach instrumental music lessons online? Is it effective?
• How can students who do not have access to modern technology at home benefit from its use?
• Menthods for students to record their own performances.

The Music Education chat is tagged on Twitter with the hashtag #musedchat - participants add the hashtag to their tweets to take part in the conversation. The #musedchat was patterned after the similar #edchat and was the brain child of Andy Zweibl, a Music Education student at the University of Miami. Andy conducts a poll each week to allow participants to select a topic, then hosts the chat, and archives and mines the chat for data using Google docs. The home of #musedchat on the web is here.

In addition, Dr. Joseph Pisano, music tech guru and web 2.0 enthusiast, has a great article on how to maximize your participation in the next #musedchat. If you'd like to join us for the next chat, I highly recommend you read this article.

The Music Education Chat on Twitter has already gotten national attention, including the attention of the Music Educators National Conference. We expect the attendance at the next chat to be at least double, possibly triple the attendance of the first chat.

The next chat is Monday, March 8th at 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Just search for #musedchat and buckle your virtual seatbelt. I also recommend that you follow @Zweibz7 and @pisanojm on Twitter to be up on the latest.

This article (c) 2010 by Thomas J. West. Please contact the author before reprinting on or offline.