Each April, Jazz Appreciation Month gives us a chance to introduce students to a style of truly American music that is rich with creativity, history, and personality. With music students in particular, the challenge is making that history feel real and engaging. One resource that can help do exactly that is the Jazz Map by Village Preservation. Believe it or not, I found out about this wonderful resource on my TV local news. After clicking through the map and finding out lots of new things about the city I’ve grown up in, I think its a great resource for all music teachers and their students.

Sometimes the simplest tools are also the most useful. Perhaps the single most impactful thing that I ever did with my band students was to record them. Whenever I recorded a snippet of a rehearsal and then played it back for them, it was the easiest way to demonstrate things like balance, intonation, blend, tone, and more. I once took a lesson from the beloved tuba player, Sam Pilafian. At that lesson, Sam told me that the single most important thing that I could do to improve as a tuba player was to record myself. He took nearly the entire hour of my lesson to explain why it was so important. If you ever want to be instantly humbled as a musician - record yourself and listen back to it. For those of you who have, am I right? When dealing with students, the same principle applies. That’s why I designed a built-in audio recorder into every MusicFirst Classroom subscription. It is a very simple interface, and students can access and record into it at any time. To access the recorder, simply click on the Software tab at the top of any MusicFirst Classroom subscription, and select MusicFirst Recorder.

I recently read an article in the The New York Times article on “Chromebook remorse,” and it reinforces something that I’ve been predicting for a while one. The article - titled “Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones” written by Natasha Singer, illustrates that while schools are not abandoning technology, they are starting to rethink how often and in what ways it is used. Instead of devices being open and available all the time, many classrooms are shifting toward a more deliberate approach in which technology is used only when it directly supports the learning goal.

About a month ago, a good friend of mine asked whether I had checked out the new Claude Chrome Extension. He was so enthusiastic about it, I knew I had to check it out. I went to the Chrome Web Store and immediately downloaded and installed it. This extension is a perfect example of Agentic AI - the type of GenAI tool that helps you do tasks that you may not want to do. It does require a paid Claude account, which will cost you $20/month, so read on before you enter your credit card details. To get started, here’s a great video that demonstrates everything that the Claude Chrome extension can do. Brace yourself.

If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you’ve probably seen a shift in how people are talking about social media. With the recent lawsuits that revolve around Meta, TikTok, SnapChat and YouTube knowingly investing in and creating features that keep young students addicted to their products, I think it’s an important inflection point for all educational technologies used in schools. What used to be framed as engaging or fun is now being described in courtrooms and legislation as something far more concerning: addictive by design. These recent lawsuits have focused on design elements like infinite scroll and autoplay, features that were intentionally built to keep users on the platform for as long as possible . And now, the flood gates are open. Thousands of similar lawsuits are now in motion, and lawmakers are beginning to require warning labels for platforms that use these kinds of “predatory” features with minors . On a personal note, I couldn’t be happier about this turn of events. I know that I am addicted to my phone, and so is everyone else in my family. If you teach children, you know that they are too. I am SO thankful that my own children grew spent their first few years device free. It makes me so sad to see kids everywhere I go with their eyes glued to screens. I believe that this moment really matters for educators. But more importantly, it gives us a chance to step back and ask a simple question: What should educational technology be designed to do?

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about how the New York City Public Schools are guiding teachers on how to properly utilize AI tools in their classrooms - the first guidance from the NYC DOE - modeled after other large urban school districts across the country - including Chicago and Denver. NYC teachers are being encouraged to use AI only to generate lesson ideas, support research, and even help draft classroom materials, but it cannot be used to grade student work or handle discipline. I think that this is a really important line in the sand, and frankly, I couldn’t agree more with that guidance. For the last few years, the conversation around AI in education has swung between two extremes. On one side, some startups and venture capitalists are extolling that AI is the future of everything. On the other side, it’s something to block, ban, or fear. What New York City is doing instead is much more practical. They are treating AI as a tool for teachers, not a replacement for teachers. And in my opinion, that’s exactly how music educators should be thinking about it.

Today I am thrilled to announce that we launched one of the most all-time requested features in the MusicFirst Classroom last week - the Assessment Library. This new feature allows teachers to save and pull questions from a question bank - something we’ve called the Assessment Library. That means that rather than writing new questions from scratch every time OR re-using a previous assessment, you’ll be able to pull any questions from the library into your new assessment - saving you TONS of time. To access this new feature, click on the Grading tab from the left menu, and then select Assessment Library. Once there you can Create a new assessment template and add questions to it. After you’ve saved that assessment, the full assessment and/or the individual questions will be available in the Assessment Library to use in any future assessment you create.

For the past few weeks, I have been authoring a new course for the soon to be relaunched MusicFirst Academy. This new course is titled AI in the Music Classroom: GenAI for Music Teachers. It has been a HUGE amount of work, but I think that the music educators who sign up for it will gain a deep understanding of the many ways that GenAI can be utilized in and out of the music classroom. As part of the research that I did for the construction of the course, I discovered that Suno - one of the GenAI music creation tools that you’ve probably read about in the news - added a digital audio workstation (DAW) back in September of 2025. At first glance, it seems very similar to the AI Studio feature found in Moises- allowing users to record ideas and integrate their prompt-based music creations with their own recorded ideas. If you already use a DAW - like Soundtrap, YuStudio, Logic Pro, GarageBand or Ableton, you already understand the basic workflow. What makes Suno Studio different is that it combines the Sunowe already knew - an AI-powered music creation platform that allows users to generate full songs with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation simply by typing a prompt - with a more familiar production environment, including multitrack editing, stem separation, and even MIDI export. Before diving in any further, I want to fully disclose that I have not upgraded my own free Suno account to kick the tires myself. No way am I going to pay $24 a month to a company that literally steals music from creators and then fails to give them credit. Sorry not sorry. To create this review of this new product, I simply did a lot of reading and watching tutorial videos. I haven’t used it myself. Here’s one of those videos:

Technology has become a constant presence in modern classrooms. Devices are everywhere. Students read on screens, watch videos, complete assignments online, and often move from one digital platform to another throughout the day. For years, the assumption behind this shift has been simple. More technology means better learning. Two recent pieces of writing challenge that assumption in important ways, and as an academic at heart, I LOVE reading books and articles like this. It is SO important to challenge norms in schools to ensure that the students in our classrooms are getting the best possible education they can. One of those books, which I recently read cover to cover, is Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion. The other is a recent New York Times article about growing concern among parents over the amount of screen time students experience during the school day. Together they raise a fundamental question for educators. If technology is so widespread in schools, is it actually helping students learn? Have we reached the ed tech tipping point - one where the benefits are outweighed by the drawbacks?

As any teacher knows, March 14th of each school year is known as “Pi Day”, relating to the first three digits of Pi. The number Pi (π) if you recall from your math classes in school, is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 3.14159, that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. When I was teaching, I didn’t want to be left out of the Pi Day celebrations. Because music and mathematics are so closely related in many ways, I always did some type of creative music making activity on March 14th. I have posted one of those lesson ideas that I blogged about a few years ago. As Pi Day is on a Saturday this year, I thought I would post a few more lesson ideas that you can do with your students. The concepts are pretty straightforward. Using π (Pi) to generate music is a great cross-curricular activity that blends math, creativity, and technology. It works especially well with middle and high school students because it gives them a rule-based system for composing, which removes the “blank page” problem. Below are five lesson ideas that could work well in a music classroom, especially with notation tools like Flat or DAWs like Soundtrap and YuStudio. I hope you find the useful!

A friend of mine sent me the video above a few days ago. He knows that I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to how computers can help enhance music education. The video is from 1986 and it shows a teacher using a computer connected to a synthesizer to help students compose music at a typical middle school in the UK. It is a wonderful time capsule, and illustrates how a teacher could integrate a single computer into a music lesson. When I first started using tech in my music classroom, I had one computer and no way of projecting it. I love how the video demonstrates how students can experiment with sounds, build musical ideas, and hear their compositions instantly played back by even the most primitive music software. At the time this was revolutionary. The computer even boasts “46 prerecorded sounds of its own,” which seemed impressive enough to warrant mention on the BBC. Watching it today, forty years later, it is hard not to smile. The technology looks primitive. The screen graphics are basic. The sounds are limited. And yet the educational ideas behind the demonstration are remarkably modern. The core concept is simple. Technology can remove barriers so students can focus on musical creativity.

For the last ten years, Soundtrap has been one of the most accessible ways for students and creators to make music online. The browser based digital audio workstation (DAW) makes it possible to record vocals, build beats, and collaborate with others without installing complicated software - all running in the browser. MusicFirst is very proud to be a Soundtrap partner, bringing this amazing software to tens of thousands of music teachers and students around the world. Yesterday, I saw a post from them announcing that they had released the newest version of their software. I immediately launched it from the MusicFirst Classroom, and I have to say - this new release is really impressive. It feels like a genuine glow up. The platform looks cleaner, works faster, and introduces several features that make producing music easier for beginners while still offering depth for more experienced creators. If you already use Soundtrap with students, or if you have been curious about browser based music production tools, the new version is worth another look.

When you first land on the Wind Repertory Project website you might not know exactly what to expect. As I like to say, it does exactly what it says on the tin. What you find on the site is a carefully constructed resource, built over many years by directors, educators, and conductors for exactly the person who is reading my post today: the band director. The Wind Repertory Project exists as a living database of wind literature and ensemble music, and it stands alongside resources like ChoralWiki, BandMusicPDF and Musopen as one of the most substantial online repositories dedicated to music for winds and percussion. The purpose of this website/project is simple. It helps users gather and organize information about compositions written for wind band and wind ensemble. For every band director who has spent hours hunting for reliable instrumentation details, program notes, instrument breakdowns, or performance history, the site answers a real professional need. The idea for the site started from a dissertation by Dr. Nikk Pilato, who currently serves as Director of Bands at Northern Kentucky University’s School of the Arts. The goal of the site is not to replace your library or publisher resources but to give you something different: broadened context and easily searchable knowledge about repertoire that matters to your program. In my opinion, it is the perfect resource to use alongside your sheet music provider. Find it on this site, buy it from whoever you usually purchase your music from.

If you have been following the rapid evolution of AI music tools, you already know that the landscape is shifting almost monthly. New platforms appear, features expand, and policies change. For music educators, the real question is not which tool is “best,” but how each one works and what kind of musical thinking it encourages. A few months ago I signed up to a waiting list for access to the newest of these tools - this one from Google - called Producer.ai. I finally got in over the weekend, and I must say - it’s really impressive - not only from a feature perspective, but also from the output. Producer.ai has a particularly unique design philosophy. To understand it clearly, it helps to compare it with other well-known generative music platforms such as Suno and Udio. All three allow users to generate music from prompts. All three can produce surprisingly polished results. But the differences in workflow, control, types of output and classroom implications are what sets it apart for me.

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.