MS Band Director

For music educators - By music educators

Band Directors Group on Facebook

If you have not heard of the Band Directors Group on Facebook, you may be missing one of the best discussion pages I have seen yet as a band director. It is comprehensive of all grades and subject matters and gets down to the business at hand for all of us. Comment threads run into the hundreds; it's like being at a directors' convention. Look for it and ask to join if it looks like your thing. I can read for quite a while and gain some interesting literature and ideas every day. It's amazing what's out there sometimes!

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Permalink Reply by Russ Weaver on August 16, 2011 at 4:38pm

Though an excellent source there are 2 reasons to use MS:

Our forums are organized and searchable

and

MS will make it into most band rooms where as facebook will not.

There's over 1000 hours of work on this site and support and collaboration are it's strengths.

I will be steering people here if they are interested in privacy and organization that makes it to their desktops as a professional network and not a social network.

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Permalink Reply by Laura K. Hartman on August 16, 2011 at 5:45pm

I understand your concern. The group is closed to band directors only - future, current, and retired. The comments are professional in nature, even though it is from a social network. No, I wouldn't use it in a classroom situation, but I will use some of the material I am retrieving from Posterous from the members of the site. I will again say how interesting it has been for me.

I won't move away from this site, MS Band Director, either, but we have to be open to getting information from all resources out there. I guess that is my point. Technology is here and we need to embrace it fully. The sheer amount and quality of material posted in Posterous on that site in the past few weeks astounds me. Over 6000 band directors have joined in the past month since the group opened as a closed group. I can't imagine it's the same material on MS Band Director, so it might only add to this site if these members would also join that and are able to take away from it some useful ideas/information to share here.

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Permalink Reply by Russ Weaver on August 17, 2011 at 7:03am

As members post the really useful and applicable information here, so goes the usefulness of the site. No sifting through thousands of lines of text and conversations, just the posting of helpful, searchable material that is supposed to be around and organized forever. Agreed that members should use all electronic resources for the betterment of their students, however when members here begin to list them in the correct forum, we all win and ultimately the students win as do the programs and music education Worldwide. This post will be moved to the electronic forum at this time. Thanks for collaborating and moving information to where it is searchable and accessible from the classroom.