There are a select number of high quality (and free) online resources out there that don’t just show you music, but invite you to play it. The Ukulaliens – Ukulele Club YouTube channel is exactly that kind of resource for ukulele students and teachers around the world. Created originally by an amazing UK music educator Rachel Webley for her school ukulele club in South Wales, these videos make learning tunes and techniques accessible, fun, and deeply musical. They are the kind of tools that let teachers elevate engagement, reinforce core skills, and foster real student ownership of music-making. With over 220 videos featuring a wide variety of instructional videos and how-to/play-along style videos of some really well known popular songs, this is one of those no-brainer resources that any music teacher who is teaching ukulele to their students should put right at the top of their bookmark list.

One of the things that generative AI does really well is finding trends or themes when given vast amounts of data. In fields like medicine, finance, manufacturing, logistics, and even retail, companies are using AI to make predictions: about diagnoses, potential fraud, efficiencies, and demand. The more data you feed these algorithms, the clearer the outcomes of the analysis you are looking for. I decided that I would use this concept to review every Music Educators Journal article over the last 90+ years to see how technology has been perceived by our profession over time. For more than a century, NAfME has used the Music Educators Journal as a forum for discussion and debate about what belongs in the music curriculum, and what doesn’t. If you trace the conversation about technology through the pages of MEJ, you see a profession that has moved from cautious curiosity to practical integration to critical reflection. While the tools have changed dramatically since they started publishing MEJ back in the 1930’s, the underlying questions have not. Here is the exact prompt that I used for this query:

Can you please do an analysis of every article ever written in the Music Educators Journal (archive here: https://journals.sagepub.com/loi/mej) and summarize the acceptance of technology across the music curriculum, how it is generally used, and any trends you can find.

What follows is a redux of the outline that it created, complete with some commentary. I hope that you find it as interesting as I do.

For today’s post, I wanted to share the incredible Virtual Instrument Museum that was curated for a long time by the Wesleyan University, but sadly, it appears that the site is no longer up and running. So I looked for similar sites and quickly found one from the UK. MINIM-UK stands for Musical Instruments Interface for Museums and Collections and is a virtual musical instrument museum that makes nearly twenty thousand historic instruments accessible online. The site was launched in 2017 as a collaborative project led by the Royal College of Music with partners including the Royal Academy of Music, the Horniman Museum and Gardens, and the University of Edinburgh. It consolidates instrument data from more than one hundred collections across the United Kingdom into a single searchable resource. And it’s pretty amazing.

Every so often, a movement emerges in music education that feels less like a new initiative and more like a return to first principles. The Music Teachers Association in the UK has done exactly that with its new campaign, A Choir in Every School. The idea is really simple: every school should provide young people with the opportunity to sing together. Not as an optional extra for a select few, but as a normal, expected part of school life. The campaign was sparked by growing concern that singing in schools is declining. That reality should give all of us pause. Singing is the most accessible form of music making we have. There is no instrument to rent, no equipment to maintain, no audition required. Every child arrives at school already carrying the instrument. When singing fades, we are not just losing a tradition. We are losing one of the most powerful entry points into lifelong musical engagement. While this is a UK campaign, I think it could be replicated here in the US - especially in the many communities without school music programs that were highlighted in a new map that I posted about a few weeks ago.

Last week I gave a talk on AI in music education. One of the main messages that I was trying to convey was that while there are many ways that AI tools can be used to help music teachers spend more time making music with their students, and less time on administrative tasks, AI in the music creation process is a far more problematic topic. We know that whether we like it or not, Generative AI is now part of the daily lives of our students, and more specifically, their musical lives - both in what music they listen to, and tools that help them create music. Using tools like Suno and Udio, they can type a prompt and instantly hear a finished track. The music that is created is often impressive, but they have no agency over it as they did relatively nothing in the creation process. For many teachers, that feels unsettling at first. I recently came across a TED Talk on YouTube given by Dustin Ballard titled “Why I Use AI to Ruin Your Favorite Song.” I was immediately intrigued and pressed play. I am glad that I did. In his talk, Ballard offers a helpful way to think about AI in the music making process. Instead of asking whether AI will replace musicians, he asks what makes music meaningful at all.

As everyone knows, JW Pepper is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the music education space. When I was a band director, I used their catalog as THE go-to resource for selecting my concert repertoire - scouring over the Editor’s Choice list, as well as the useful categories and grade levels to create a balanced and exciting program, year after year. Last week at TMEA, we were thrilled to announce that this amazing company is partnering with us to bring our extraordinary elementary music curriculum, MusicFirst Elementary, to their massive list of customers - and we couldn’t be any more exicited.

Last week, I had the absolute pleasure of attending the annual Music & Drama Education Expo in London. This is a very special show for me, as it was at the very first one, back in 2013, that we officially launched MusicFirst as a brand. A LOT has happened since then, but this show remains a consistently great event to showcase the many different solutions that MusicFirst offers, and as the largest annual conference of its kind in England, I’ve been to this show many, many times since. Unlike most shows in the United States, this one is completely FREE to attendees. It runs on Thursday and Friday every year, and while I do tend to get approached by numerous startups as the show provides free access to everyone, I always enjoy the chance to catch up with all of the members of the UK team, as well as many of our partners. What made this particular show special was the fact that for the first time, MusicFirst exhibited alongside Charanga, our sister company in the UK. Our stand was buzzing throughout the entire event, and it was so good to see so many of our existing partners and customers.

Yesterday at the Music & Drama Education Expo here in London, I was introduced to Simon Tew, who runs an amazing company here in the UK called Digit Music. When I went over to their booth, I immediately saw some incredible adaptive technologies for students that allow them to interact with music software. Making music accessible for ALL students has always been one of my passions. If you have spent any meaningful time in music education, you eventually discover that one of the most persistent misconceptions in our field is that students struggle because music itself is inherently difficult. In practice, the difficulty rarely begins with pitch, rhythm, tone production, or even motivation. It begins with access. Before we can teach understanding, students must first be able to participate, both physically and cognitively, in the act of making music. Digit Music addresses this head on. The first thing I saw at their booth was a familiar hardware device for students who might be wheelchair bound - the joystick. However this was no ordinary joystick. Named CMPSR, this joystick is actually a hardware device that can be plugged into any music software that interacts with USB MIDI controllers, and unlike many other adaptive musical instruments, it’s VERY affordable. Here’s a quick look:

If you were watching Super Bowl LX, you were probably just as blown away by Charlie Puth’s version of the Star Spangled Banner as I was. To me, it was simply incredible. I loved the harmonization, the arrangement, and the performance. For an anthem that is sung before every sporting event, it’s always special when you hear one that is truly original while honoring the purpose of an anthem. Charlie’s was the best I’ve heard in a LONG time - perhaps, dare I say, since Whitney Houston’s version back at Super Bowl XXV in 1991. When I found out that her performance was the inspiration, I wasn’t surprised at all. It also reminded me of an assignment that I created for the MusicFirst Classroom about comparing and contrasting two performances of our national anthem. I’ve updated that original assignment to include these two iconic performances. I hope that you can use it with your students. Let me know what you think!

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of everyday music creation - whether we like it or not. Students are experimenting with AI tools such as Udio and Suno for composition, and many music educators that I have spoken with about AI during my numerous sessions and keynote addresses surrounding this topic find these tools and this topic to be the most distressing. Is the future of music going to be filled with music created by AI? I certainly hope not. At the same time, streaming platforms, publishers, and educators are asking an important question: How do we know whether a piece of music was created by a human or generated by AI? There are now numerous examples of fake bands and musical arists all over Spotify. A new, free tool called DETECT.MUSIC, developed by MatchTune, aims to help answer that question. The service is designed to analyze music tracks and determine whether they are likely AI-generated, and in some cases identify which AI engine may have been used. For music educators, this tool is worth paying attention to, not because it solves every problem around AI, but because it helps clarify an increasingly blurry landscape.

My wife Alison and I absolutely LOVE watching the Winter Olympics. We really look forward to it. Ice skating, skiiing, bobsled, luge, speed skating, the winter biathlon, and of course the MUSIC - we love it all. Now that the TV commericals are non-stop and the Opening Ceremony is only a few days away, I thought it would be fun to use an event like this as inspiration for a composition activity with students. What follows is a lesson plan that you can do with many of the software tools available from MusicFirst that has students choosing a specific aspect of the games and composing a relatively short piece of music using notation sofwtare or a DAW. I hope you can use this over the next few weeks with your students!

Today I’m out in Colorado Springs, CO at the 2026 CMEA Conference on behalf of MusicFirst. I always enjoy traveling around the world meeting teachers at events like this. Frequently, I also present a variety of sessions for MusicFirst while I’m at these events, and this one is no different. Sometimes when I check the conference program, I notice that I am scheduled to present a session that I’ve never done before. We have an amazing team that creates session titles and descriptions for us, and at this show there’s a session titled: What the Tech?! Lesson Learned From 35+ Years Implementing Music Technology. Here’s the session description.

I’m really excited to announce the launch of a brand new beginner band curriculum for music theory and ear training, now included in Auralia and Musition and the MusicFirst Classroom. This new Beginning Band Course is available as part of MusicFirst’s Performance Solution and is designed to support the earliest stages of band instruction with structured, developmentally appropriate musicianship learning. If you are a current MusicFirst Classroom user, you will find this new course, as well as the new Beginning Orchestra course, in the MusicFirst Content Library under the Band and Orchestra categories, as of today.

Yesterday on Facebook, Bob Morrison posted this map alongside the following text:

Ever wonder what music education across the country looks like? Here you go. The first-ever map of access to music education for the entire nation was compiled from the Arts Ed Data Project. This is a US map of COUNTIES. Each county is colored based on the percent of SCHOOLS offering music in that county. The darkest blue is 100%. The darkest orange is 0% or near 0%. Very light blue is 50%. What patterns do you see? HT to the extraordinary David Wish for his question several years ago. PS - It only took my team and I 20 years to build this! Special thanks to The Music Man Foundation, CMA Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the support to make this possible!

For those of you that don’t know Bob, he is a FORCE in music education. Bob is the Founder of Music for All, was the founding CEO of the VH1 Save The Music Foundation, served as the Director of Market Development for the NAMM, where he helped create the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation and was recognized for his work add the arts as a core subject to the nation's education goals. He is the Founder and CEO of Quadrant Research, the nation’s leading arts education research organization, and a recognized pioneer in statewide arts education status and condition research. This map comes directly from his work on the Arts Ed Data Project.

Sometimes you find music resources on your own by searching for them or seeing a post from another music educator, and sometimes you learn about them from people sitting in the front row at one of your sessions at a conference. Meet Whack Em All - a fantastic YouTube channel that is filled with engaging play-a-long videos for Boomwhackers that a teacher at my modern band session told me about this past Saturday. She was telling me that she plays pop music with her elementary students using this channel. Whenever I hear about new resources directly from the mouths of teachers who actually use them, I get excited. I actually told her, and the audience, that I would be writing about it today. As music teachers, we spend a lot of time looking for relevant and engaging resources that will help music come alive for our students. But what captures students’ attention? What motivates them to engage? What makes music feel connected to their everyday lives rather than confined to the classroom? Increasingly, the answers to those questions live online, often in places we would not traditionally label as “music education.” This YouTube channel, Whack Em All, created by Kristoffer Widerberg with art by Thanya Widerberg, is one of those places.

Yesterday at the 2026 Michigan Music Conference, I had the chance to present a session with a title that probably made a few people smile knowingly: “Ear Training and Music Theory: There’s An App for That.” It was a packed room, which tells me something important: music educators want to teach theory and ear training well, but time, logistics, and competing priorities often get in the way. The central challenge we talked about is one every director recognizes immediately. Rehearsal time is limited. Performance demands are relentless. And yet, we all know that ear training and music theory aren’t “extras.” They’re foundational skills that directly impact intonation, sight-reading, rhythmic accuracy, musical independence, and long-term student success.

January is filled with music educator conferences around the country and the world. I’ve spent nearly 30 years presenting sessions at these events and I’ve noticed something. Although string programs are a HUGE part of American music eduation, they are often the smallest part of a conference. They also often feel left out of dedicated music technology solutions. At MusicFirst we’ve always tried to provide the best tools for ALL aspects of a music program - including strings. The recent launch of the Beginner Orchestra Curriculum in Auralia & Musition is a perfect resource for beginning string players. Rising Software, a part of MusicFirst, has once again shown what it means to listen closely to the needs of music programs and respond with heart, insight, and genuine support for musical growth.

There is a moment every music teacher knows well. It’s something that I personally experience quite often. You discover a new piece of technology, a shiny new app or tool, and for a brief moment it feels like it might be the answer to everything. Engagement. Assessment. Differentiation. Grading. And then reality sets in. Some tools stick. Some do not. Some genuinely improve teaching and learning. Others quietly disappear after a semester or two. That tension is not a failure of technology. It is a reminder of what our job actually is. Technology in the music classroom should never be the point. It should always be the support.

As music teachers, we are often encouraged to get our students to compose music using a variety of tools: notation tools such as Flat for Education or Noteflight and digital audio workstations like Soundtrap and YuStudio. The problem is that many music educators have either never composed music themselves OR were never taught effective pedagogy for teaching composition. It’s very similar to improvisation - if you’ve never done it yourself, it’s a little tricky to teach others. I have trained thousands of teachers how to get started with composition in their classrooms, and one of the first things I discuss is coming up with prompts to get students inspired. A picture, a poem, a current event, etc. II recently came across Ryan Leach’s YouTube channel and found one really great video titled “12 Composition Exercises to Get Inspired, Beat Writer’s Block, & Write More Music.” It’s a wonderful overview of ways to get started with composing music - especially if you have writer’s block. In the same way that we encourage students to listen deeply and think critically, Leach gives practical, immediate exercises that push young composers to start composing right away, wit a variety of helpful suggestions on how to get inspired.

Sometimes the best tools for music educators really are the simplest ones. Last night, while interviewing Jamin Hoffman, a brilliant music educator from Wisconsin, we were talking about the ways he uses technology with his high school string students. While Jamin use of many of the tools available in the MusicFirst Performance Bundle, what really stopped me in my tracks was a resource he mentioned almost in passing: Cello Drones. If you’re not already familiar with it, Cello Drones is about as stripped-down as a teaching tool can get. It’s a free YouTube resource consisting of a cello sustaining a single pitch for six minutes. No visuals. No interactivity. No flashy interface. Just a beautifully centered drone played by a cello. Jamin uses these videos to help his students tune themselves while listening to the drone, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how powerful this approach is—not just for string players, but for developing musicianship across the board. Teaching students how to tune to a drone is one of those skills that pays dividends far beyond the tuning process itself. And the best part? All you need is a way to hook up the audio from your computer (or phone) to room speakers so that your students can hear it - no need to project the video at all. There’s even an album on Spotify that your students can use when they’re practicing!