If you search the Web for the phrase “music education” using the Google search engine, you will find that there are more than 4 million listings. Obviously, most people don't have time to sort through that many sites in order to identify the most useful ones. Fortunately, now you no longer have to.

Welcome to the first “Web Sitings” column. In each issue of Music Education Technology magazine, this column will showcase a few of the best music-education sites. Each installment will also showcase one or more sites created by actual music teachers who work in public or private K — 12 schools. Each of these sites solves real problems encountered daily by music teachers.

www.town4kids.com/town4kids/kids/music4kids/musicfront.htm
Let's begin with a site designed for young children. The Music4Kids section of town4kids.com (see Fig. 1) has many great music activities and games for elementary-school students. The site teaches students about orchestral instruments, musical instruments of the world, composers, and musical forms. You'll find a useful dictionary of music terms, a MIDI jukebox, and links to other resources. Cartoon figures of the species “MIDIsaurus” make the site a delight for young children as they learn the basics of music. This site has lovely images, includes lots of MP3 and MIDI files, and doesn't talk down to kids.

www.musictheory.net
Next, let's look at a site designed for older children and young adults. MusicTheory.net (see Fig. 2) is a remarkably generous donation of time and expertise by a young man named Ricci Adams. This site uses Macromedia's Flash Player to teach and drill almost every imaginable topic in music theory. It is a great site for everyone from those just learning to read music to music teachers who need to brush up on their aural skills.

The content is divided into lessons, trainers, and utilities. The lessons begin with basic music notation and cover meters, scales, chords, and harmonic analysis. The trainers are basically drill programs on topics like intervals, scales, and chords. Each lesson or trainer uses a simple, consistent interface with big, easy-to-read notation. The trainers use high-quality audio and constant feedback. The utilities include a chord calculator that spells the notes of a chord and shows them on a keyboard for any scale degree in any key, a staff-paper generator, and a matrix generator for studying 12-tone music.

The lessons and trainers are available for download as standalone applications for both Macintosh and Windows.

www.musictechteacher.com
Karen Garrett teaches instrumental music and music technology at Central Park School in Birmingham, Alabama. She meets once each week for 45 minutes with her third-grade music-technology students in a tiny lab she calls “The Closet.” There, she uses Harmonic Vision's MusicAce, GVox's MusicTime Deluxe, and other software to help her students learn music fundamentals and to encourage them to create their own music.

But how do you keep kids engaged in music learning when you get to see them only once a week? Garrett addresses this problem with an extensive Web site. At musictechteacher.com, she posts music games, quizzes, lessons, and photographs to keep her kids engaged in making music all through the week. She also posts student work for the world to see and hear, using MIDI files and the Sibelius Scorch plug-in for online music notation.

MusicTechTeacher.com has won several awards, including a USA Today News Award for Education Best Bet Web site. This site is popular with music teachers from California to New Zealand.

The number of great Web resources for music teachers is enormous. We hope to bring some of the more interesting sites to your attention in each installment of “Web Sitings.” You will find links to these resources and many others at www.stevenestrella.com/mused/websitings.html. If you know a great site for music education, please write to me at steve@stevenestrella.com.

Steven Estrella owns StevenEstrella.com and Shearspire, Inc. (www.shearspire.com), and creates interactive media for business and education. Dr. Estrella served for ten years on the music-education faculty at Temple University and is the vice president of the Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME).

GVox Interactive Music; e-mail info@gvox.com; Web www.gvox.com

Harmonic Vision, Inc.; tel. (800) 474-0903 or (312) 332-9200; e-mail sales@harmonicvision.com; Web www.harmonicvision.com