Thomas J. West Music

Over the past year, new professional learning networks for music educators have sprung up and are revolutionizing the way music teachers communicate. Here is an update on which networks are seeing the most use and have the best resources available:

By far the fastest-growing and most dynamic community is the Facebook Band Directors Group. It was started in January of 2010 by Brian Wis and got a reboot at the beginning of the summer when the group of 2,500 band directors relocated to a new group with a closed format.  Membership in the past 90 days has shot up to over 7,000 members. Some of the most accomplished band directors in the profession are now involved, and the teachers administrating the page have very clear intentions about keeping any kind of self-promotion or affiliate product promotion out of the conversation.

The conversations are fast and furious on this group, almost to the point of being imporssible to keep up with in real time. Group members have created content to help everyone navigate and save content with various online resources. There is also a common resource repository using a dedicated Posterous page.  If you are a music education major with band as your emphasis, are a practicing band director at any age level, or are a band retiree, you need to be on this group sharing your own knowledge and expertise.

The second largest community is a Facebook page (not group) called Band Director. It also has over 7,000 members, though is not nearly as dynamic as the closed group. I am one of the administrators for this page, and third-party posts from affiliates, companies, and other for-profit organizations are permitted. Again, some of the biggest names in the world of scholastic band follow this page, such as David Holsinger, Frank Ticheli, Jon Bourgeois, and others.

Conversations on this page are not as fast and furious, and the tone is definitely a lot different than the closed band director group. I post a lot of content from my own blog on the page and try to share as much relevant information as possible. Band Directors tend to treat the page as more of a place to receive relevant content than to use it as a professional development network.

The next largest community, and by far the most well-rounded and integrated, is the Music Professional Learning Network, or MPLN. The brian-child of Dr. Joseph Pisano, MPLN was launched in July of 2010 and has grown to just under 2,000 members. One of the main differences with MPLN is that it is a community for all music educators, not just band directors. Everyone from pre-K music teachers all the way up to researching doctoral faculty of several major universities are involved in the dynamic conversations going on within the confines of this network.

In addition, Dr. Pisano has fully integrated MPLN's Buddy Press engine with major social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Last FM, Diigo, SoundCloud, and YouTube. You can easily send message out to these networks from within MPLN or you can send messages from Twitter directly into MPLN by using the #mpln hashtag. There quite literally is something here for everyone, and the conversations here are as dynamic as the Facebook Band Directors Group. I am a steering committee member of this great organization and have enjoyed its growth tremendously.

Also quite active are the Facebook School Orchestra and String Teachers, v. 2 group at just under 1,200 members, the I teach percission group at just under 400 members, the I Teach Music Technology group at 200 members, and the forums at the National Association for Music Education.

The great thing about all of these communities is that it is the members themselves sharing a goldmine of personal experience, wisdom, and resources. It is "shop talk" for the 21st century. All you need to do is join and contribute.

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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