Another wonderful day at TMEA and TI:ME’s National Conference! Thursday is the official start of the TMEA Conference after TI:ME’s pre-conference day on Wednesday. Technology sessions continued and other sessions including elementary, middle school, band, chorus, orchestra, and more, were enjoyed by over 25,000 music educators.

Highlights

There were some amazing sessions today. One highlight was Jim Frankel’s “How Technology Can Enhance Your Program: Lessons from the Pandemic”. One could easily turn negative when referencing their experiences of teaching during a lockdown, or hybrid learning. However, Jim focused on everything positive that music educators could continue to use in their classrooms that they learned to use during the pandemic. Here are some highlights:

• Creativity

  • Use websites like incredibox or Youdj (the educational free version)

• Practice

  • Use PracticeFirst within MusicFirst’s program to practice and perform their song many times.

  • By using PracticeFirst, students can see their progress in their rhythm and their pitch when playing the song.

• Assessment

  • Use PracticeFirst to show how well they played their song from Essential Elements (band and orchestra methodology) or other songs included in the program and have it display where they could make corrections.

  • Both school and classroom

• Theory

  • Try Musition to write in counts as their band homework to be completed at home.

  • Use Auralia to teach tuning and have them practice that with the program as homework at home.

  • At the beginning of band or chorus, bring up the Sightreading Factory and have the ensemble sightread together for a few minutes. By using the program, you save a lot of time not having to pass out and collect music.

• Newzik

  • This program scans music that you can play, mark up, and bring into PracticeFirst.

Jim reminded everyone that now that you have learned how to integrate technology into the classroom because the pandemic forced us to, let’s remind ourselves that we can continue to use it to assist our students’ needs in learning, creating, and making music.

Exhibits

TMEA has one of the largest exhibit areas. It can take up to a day to walk around and grasp all of the booths. However, you also get to explore products in person and talk to the many gurus of music education like Denise Gagne, John Jacobson, Katie Wardrobe, and many more. Below were the numerous gurus I was able to speak to today.

• Please stop back tomorrow for more highlights!