Let’s face it, everyone loves social media – especially kids. You might be sick of social media, but the good news is that you can use it to enhance your classroom guitar program. Teachers are creating twitter and pinterest boards in their classrooms. It’s a fun way to engage students and have them really explore the pieces or the instrument beyond just playing the notes on a page.
Before you construct a social media bulletin board in your guitar classroom or in your school’s hallway, I suggest you look at the social networks a little. Here’s the lowdown on some the major platforms and a few actionable ideas.
How to model it in the guitar classroom: Have each student create a Pinterest board dedicated to a composer they love. They should bring in a pic and a link to where they found the picture.
Hear "Stay With Me" from Bob Dylan's new album Shadows In The Night courtesy of @nprmusic http://t.co/QXpX4FitNq
— bobdylan.com (@bobdylan) January 19, 2015
Anything that you can say, can be said in 140 characters or less. The nice thing about twitter is that it forces you to hook people quickly (like music!). A lot of the time tweets are trying to get you to read or learn more.
How to model it in the guitar classroom: Each student composes a tweet about a piece, a composer, or a guitarist. Their objective is to tweet so that their fellow classmates want to learn more. Encourage your students to bring in a great picture and a link to more information. You might even want to ask them to do multiple tweets.
This is the dominant social network. It is primarily for people to post updates on their children and cats. But companies like Coca Cola, Fender, and even Teaching Guitar Workshops use it to promote because over a billion people use the service!
How to model it in the guitar classroom: Students should bring in a picture of a guitar they really want to play, along with a BRIEF explanation of why we’re looking at the picture.