Thomas J. West Music

Today is the first day that iSchoolMusic, the content management system for scholastic performing ensembles, is taking pre-orders for their new, totally free service this fall.

Visit their website HERE

Two years ago, I was invited to the alpha launch of iSchoolBand. I dubbed it "Facebook for the Band Room and much more." This past May, the folks behind the scenes asked me to help promote a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to make their new version of the service, now entitled iSchoolMusic, free for life for everyone, just like Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media platforms.

That Kickstarter was the victim of poor timing, with school ensemble directors in the midst of spring concerts and adjudications. While not being successful in raising the funds, the Kickstarter did attract the attention of some investors who have partnered with iSchoolMusic to make their dream a reality - a free-to-use content management system with fully-featured modern capabilities.

I won't even begin to describe all of the features that iSchoolMusic already has available, let alone the impressive features they are adding. There's simply too many great features in the works. Suffice it to say that if you are a director, student, or parent of a scholastic band, chorus, or orchestra program, iSchoolMuisc will have everything your organization needs to stay connected, share information, pool resources, get organized, and even advertise. All of it happens on a secure, private network where the school professionals can easily monitor all activity (or delegate authority to indicated personel).

I started following @ischoolmusicnew, their new Twitter account, at 9:30 this morning, and by 10:00 there were already six new schools signed up, servicing approximately 1000 students! This quite literally is going to be exactly what school music ensembles needed - a way to break into social media and online content management without spending money and without the tedious process of developing their own site.

I look forward to watching iSchoolMusic develop into a platform for music education at a time when they need all of the support they can possibly get.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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