Tech Teaching Tips: San Francisco Symphony site

The San Francisco Symphony has developed an interactive site for young-middle school students on music, instruments, and composing. On SFS Kids students can learn to compose and play music. It is a free site and does not require any log-in for your students.

There are lots of sections to click on and just dive into -

To start it's probably a good idea to start with the "Discover" section and see how the site works.

Most computer-savvy kids will follow along quite easily. In this section they listen to samples of different styles of music performed by the symphony orchestra. Dialog boxes pop up giving information about the style of the piece that they are hearing. After listening to recordings, students can then go to a game section where they are to recognize and match rhythms.

When students click on the "Perform" section they can choose from about 15 orchestral instruments to listen to and even hear and play a scale on them - clarinets, timpani drums, tubs, pianos, etc. In the "Compose" section students are first presented with the basics of how to drag musical notes onto a scale and then can create their own musical compositions based on what they've learned from the other sections of the website.

I've played around with it for a short time and was impressed with how much information is contained in the site as well as how students can compose a variety of pieces within a short time.

SFSKids Definitely worth checking into!!