As always, I was very happy to be a part of the annual PA Music Educator’s National Convention. This year it was held in Pittsburgh, PA. For the past few years, I’ve “manned” the Grove City College display and have had the privilege of getting to see dozens and dozens of our music alumni and many new prospective students while at the conference.
I’m fairly sure that I had a chance to see almost everyone that acutally attended the conference -sooner or later they all came by to say hi, or a least walked by! While I didn’t present this year at PMEA, I did facilitate a great SKYPE session for Phi Beta Mu International where we brought, fellow member, Dr. Lowell Hepler directy into our yearly meeting at August Henry’s, via Skype, to receive the 2010 Phi Beta Mu International Bandmaster’s Award. Congratulations Lowell!
While there are just two many conversations, ensembles, and clinics to talk about that were amazing this year, I am always happy to meet up with my education, composer, and industry friends at PMEA (By the way stay tuned for some exciting new educational projects that were stirred up at PMEA for MusTech.Net and myself!). It truly was a great conference for me and, I’m sure, all that attendended. Many thanks to the leadership at PMEA for another great year and conference.
I am excited to say a tangible “awakening” of sorts has finally started to happen for some of my own college undergraduates as a result of them attending this conference. The value of future music educators (as well as any future person with a music-related career) attending conferences such as these is priceless with regard to their education. This year, through my students’ use of the Twitter Medium, I could easily judge that many of them “finally got it” and have taken to heart my on-going message about the importance of Networking and Getting “Out of the Box”. It was very exciting to see them process the clinics that they were attending (as they were atttending) and, literally, watch the value that these sessions, vendors, and meetings provided them.
More than anything, by using Twitter (via the hash-tag #pmea10), I was able to see “education happen” for them as they tweeted “chunks” of great information that they had discovered/learned at PMEA, live, via the Internet. All in all, over 30 Grove City under-graduate students attended the conference.
There were a few students that were particulary “tweetful” with regard to their “tweetage”. Yes, I just make these words up as I go along… I encourage you to follow along with them on Twitter: Elizabeth Heist, Andrew Ritenour, and Brittany Bell. Live Tweeting of events of these type by people/students provides much of the same academic capital that other more traditional avenues do and in some cases, more:
- Thought Crystallization
- Reflection
- Reinforcement
- Sharing of knowledge and Contributing to a large pool of information
- Outlet for written creativity
- Tremendous networking opportunities.
I’ve included a Google Doc Below of their tweets so you can judge for yourself how fruitful their experience at PMEA tuned out to be for them:
[iframehttp://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tNYf6LcQIxdA4xYxNvu1D0g&single=true&gid=0&output=html 575px 700px]
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by pisanojm: My Grove City Students Rock The TwitterStream At The PMEA Convention In Pittsburgh http://bit.ly/aFD3qo #pmea10…
This is so true! I would love to see more undergraduates (AND current teachers!) Sharing their “take-aways” from sessions at conferences. What an incredible opportunity for members who can’t attend to learn as well!