June 29th

After our conversation about the WebQuest Project I decided to go in a different direction and create something more straightforward and accessible to a young audience. Honestly the guitar project too would be more applicable to the vast majority of my students - I teach a mix of young beginners/low level players (often middle school), adults, and a few more advanced high schoolers. So what I am creating will be very useful for me especially for the next time I am teaching a general guitar class.

I feel like I am struggling with the Introduction and Conclusion sections of the project, particularly the introduction - how to come up with something that is gripping and will draw the students in, without feeling contrived/corny. On reflection I think the Introduction idea is something I struggle with generally in my teaching. I would be curious about your thoughts on what I have there - I think you were right that my first idea was too high level for my audience, it would have been unlikely to achieve the goals I set out without more preparation. I considered the idea of reviewing jazz eras but ultimately was having a hard time thinking about how to fit something like that into an assignment of this size without feeling like I wasn't giving enough depth on any given era.

I've enjoyed working with google sites a lot and am looking forward to digging into that more tomorrow, I think this is going to be very useful for my studio.

The MusicFirst presentation was great, it would be nice to be able to get into it and play around a lot. About a year ago my school was considering a similar product from Berklee, which I reviewed, but, felt like the curriculum was too proscriptive to be useful for us/our teachers.