MusicEdMajor.net » Website

Happy Birthday!

Andy Zweibel — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:50:46 +0000

While on a Skype Call with my dynamic and enthusiastic co-editor Andy Ritenour, I noticed that today is a very special day in MusicEdMajor.net’s life. Today marks MusiscEdMajor.net’s first birthday! That’s right, it was one year ago today that I launched the site and welcomed everyone with the first post. Back then, I was scrambling to get things in order for my live-blog of MENC’s Music Education Week. Now? Well, things aren’t much different now, and we’re still getting ready to cover Music Ed Week (stay tuned for more info soon!). Over the course of the year, however, we’ve had some great milestones:

Our first guest post, by Don Stinson, on Surviving the First Two Years
Coverage of the Midwest Clinic and FMEA Conferences in the winter
The creation of the #MusEdChat, the weekly Twitter Chat for Music Educators
Bringing on a co-editor in Andy Ritenour

It’s been a wild ride so far, and I fully expect the next year to be even wilder, but I am looking forward to it. Special thanks go out to Andy Ritenour for his wonderful co-editing and fantastic work recently on the #MusEdChat Recaps, Dr. Joe Pisano for his constant support, advice, and enthusiasm for the world of blogging about Music Education, and every single person who has come to visit the site. You guys are why we do this! Very special thanks go out to my wonderful girlfriend, Liz, for supporting my creation of the site last summer, helping me proof posts when I was writing so often I couldn’t see straight, and dealing with my long hours spent on the computer working on theme tweaks and code hacks.

I’m looking forward to an exciting year, ahead, and I hope you are too! Stay tuned in the coming days for a “year in review” post, recapping some of the top posts here in the past year. If you have some time, check out the MusicEdMajor Archives, and leave a comment to this post listing some of your favorites! They will definitely find themselves on the list, and you’ll even get a hat-tip for them!

Until next year…

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MusicEdNews.com Launches

Andy Zweibel — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:00:25 +0000

I am thrilled to announce the launch of MusicEdNews.com, a project of myself and Dr. Joe Pisano!

MusicEdNews.com is set to serve as your one-stop shop for all things music education-related. It will act as an aggregator for over 30 different RSS Feeds from blogs, websites, and podcasts related to Music Education. In short, if it’s about music ed, and it’s on the web, you can find it at MusicEdNews.com! In this day and age, music educators of all types have started creating content online. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and RSS, this information is now easier than ever to consume. However, this doesn’t mean we should be satisfied with using basic RSS Feed Readers to consume our information. MusicEdNews.com aims to make the consumption of information even easier by aggregating the top feeds in one place.

In addition to the website, which offers a streamlined and categorized way to view the most recent feed updates, we have created a twitter account (@MusicEdNews) which will tweet updates from each of the feeds that MusicEdNews.com follows. If twitter is your primary means for information-consumption, and you’re a music educator (or aspiring educator), then @MusicEdNews is definitely an account you should follow!

The website launched Wednesday night, and will be on a constant state of flux for the next few weeks as Dr. Pisano and I make changes. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to contact us. In the meantime, give MusicEdNews.com a look!

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MusicEdMajor.net Welcomes a New Editor

Andy Zweibel — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:09:03 +0000

It’s my pleasure to announce that MusicEdMajor.net now has a new co-editor! Please welcome Andy Ritenour, Music Education student at Grove City College in Grove City, PA. Andy comes to us as a student of Dr. Joseph Pisano, who was instrumental in getting me blogging to begin with. Andy is in Dr. Pisano’s Music Technology class, and has participated in the past few weeks’ #MusEdChat discussions. He also has just started a blog, Future Music Educators.

Andy is a Sophomore at GCC, and is extremely involved in ensembles, playing in two brass quintets, two concert bands, a symphony orchestra, and a touring choir. He also serves as a member of (and the librarian for) the Grove City College Wolverine Marching Band. Andy’s primary instruments are Tuba and Euphonium, and he also works as a marching and brass instructor for the Somerset Area High School Marching Band.

I am extremely excited to have Andy on the MusicEdMajor.net staff! Although referring to the two of us at the same time may be confusing (Andy and Andy…?), he brings a fresh set of ideas to the site, as well as a clear writing style and a passion for what he does. Be on the lookout for regular posts by both Andy’s right here at MusicEdMajor.net!

You can contact Andy Ritenour by email at andyr@musicedmajor.net, or on Twitter at @andrewritneour

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New Music Ed Major Facebook Community

Andy Zweibel — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:56:10 +0000

This website was started in an effort to create a community of Music Education Majors (and current teachers) to discuss important topics in the field. While commenting on formal “posts” here on the site is one way to do this, I have come to realize that a better avenue for more frequent conversation is a website that is much more frequently visited than this, and that already has a large number of Music Education Majors as registered users. That website, of course, is Facebook. I came to this realization after coming across a Facebook community for Band Directors, thanks to a tweet from Thomas J. West (@thomasjwest). The page has over 3,700 “fans,” and discussions occur frequently and on a wide variety of topics.

Because most college students (myself included) practically live on Facebook, and as a result of the success of the Band Director page, I have decided to start a Music Education Major page on Facebook! On this page, you can meet other Music Education Majors, as well as discuss topics that are pertinent to the field, but may not be worth a full-length post here on this site.

Don’t get me wrong, I still plan on posting here frequently (at least more frequently than I have already). The Facebook page will be more for connecting with other students, and discussing more specific questions. If you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see discussed on the page, please feel free to contact me at any time!

If you’re a Music Education Major, or already have your degree in Music Ed, I would encourage you to “become a fan” of the page, and to suggest the page to any other possibly-interested friends you may have!

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MusTech.Net Lists Must-Have Freebies

Andy Zweibel — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:00:29 +0000

Dr. Joe Pisano, the man behind MusTech.net, has put up a fantastic resource that was just too helpful to pass up sharing with everyone here. He has compiled a list of the top downloadable “freebies” for music teachers. These programs range in type from audio editing to ear training to metronomes, and the list includes programs that run on each of the three major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux). While the post is billed as being a list for music teachers, I found that many of the programs that are mentioned have been extremely helpful to me as a music student as well. With tuition being the way it is nowadays, too, we can always use more free resources!

Check out Dr. Pisano’s post, “Music Teachers -Must Have Downloadable Freebies For The New School Year,” today at MusTech.net. Be sure to check out some of his other great posts too, including his creation of a netvibes page for Music Education bloggers/podcasters (which MusicEdMajor.net is featured on), and his list of the top music pedagogues to follow on Twitter!

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MusicEdMajor.net Featured on MusTech.net Netvibes Page

Andy Zweibel — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:19:23 +0000

First off, please allow me to apologize for the lull in activity here on MusicEdMajor.net. I have been, as many of you also may be, extremely busy with the excitement of band camps! I am staffing one camp this summer, which is currently halfway over, and am also preparing for my own band camp at the University of Miami, which begins in just under a week. I do have a few posts planned, and expect to have them up over the course of the next week or so. Stay tuned for more!

I do, however, have an exciting piece of news to share! Dr. Joseph Pisano, creator of MusTech.net, has published a Netvibes page which he calls the “Current Music Education Beat!” Netvibes is a service that allows users to create accounts and aggregate the latest posts from multiple RSS feeds onto one page for viewing. Dr. Pisano has put together 12 of the most frequently updated blogs in the field of Music Education, and I am proud to announce that MusicEdMajor.net has been chosen on this list!

Here are the 12 blogs and bloggers that have been placed on the Netvibes page (list courtesy of J. Pisano at MusTech.net):

I have had correspondence with about half of the bloggers on this list, and subscribe to almost all of them in my Google Reader. I would highly recommend you check out not only Dr. Pisano’s Netvibes Page, but also his blog at MusTech.net. He is truly one of the top authorities on Technology in Music Education, not to mention the person who motivated me to take my blogging onto a more professional level with his 100 ME Bloggers campaign in 2008.

Additionally, Dr. Pisano has aggregated his top 7 Music Education Podcasts, which are all fantastic resources as well. The list of featured podcasters is as follows:

I also subscribe to many of these podcasts, and can attest to the high quality of the content. A special thanks, again, to Dr. Pisano for featuring MusicEdMajor.net on his Netvibes page! Be sure to stay updated with MusicEdMajor.net by subscribing to our feed!

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Welcome!

Andy Zweibel — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:24:47 +0000

Welcome to MusicEdMajor.net! This website will be a resource for collegiate students studying Music Education all over the world, and will include posts from current and former Music Education majors about being a college student in the field, including tips, tricks, news, information, and other resources. Basically, it will include anything and everything related to the study of Music Education at the collegiate level!

The site was founded by myself, Andy Zweibel, and I am currently the only writer. If you are a college student of Music Education (or studied Music Ed when you were in college) and are interested in sharing your thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment here, or contact me by any of the means listed on the Contact Page! I am extremely excited for what the collegiate population can add to the online community in the field of Music Education!

Additionally, if you have suggestions or requests for certain topics to be covered on this site, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I would be happy to explore them!

In the meantime, have a look around, and read a little more about me on the About page if you would like. I look forward to sharing ideas and thoughts with you!

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