Jonathan Savage

It was good to welcome another cohort of students to MMU yesterday. They seemed all keen and smiley! One of the discussions we had was about music software. The opening question was about Sibelius (a piece of software which many of them are familiar with) and how they can extend their knowledge into new areas. I stressed that buying large pieces of software is probably not the answer for many of them at the moment. I suggested that they explore open-source solutions or other free-ware. To this end, it was great to see that Joseph Pisano has done a fantastic post on free music software for music teachers. You can read it here. Thanks for doing this Joseph.

I’ve had lots of students enquiring about the free MA in Teaching that you can do at the Institute of Education, MMU. You can get further details here. We are hoping to run a music component for this course from September 2008. Students who graduated from our PGCE programme last year have 60 credits already. But any other teachers can also apply to do it too. Do contact the PDP office for further information.

Had a phone call from the MMU publicity office. They wanted a photo of a student and me for the website and a newsletter article about the new BMus with QTS course that we are running this year at the RNCM. The lady said, ” Find me a photogenic student”. I said, “What about finding a photogenic lecturer?” You haven’t seen what I look like!” To which she replied, “Oh, don’t worry about that, we can always blur you out in the background a bit!” Great. Anyway, thanks to Philippa for choosing Helen from the PGCE in Music with Specialist Strings Teaching who came along and was photogenic. I didn’t get too blurred out either (but I did have my hair cut (what hair?!) specially and wore a suit). I’ll post a link to the article in due course but here is the photo: