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Welcome to my website, “Flute Playing for the Semi-Beginner.”  This site is created as an effort to create learning opportunities for the 5th grade flute player.  If you play flute in your school band, this site will give you opportunities to learn more about the flute and how to play it that there isn’t much time for during the school day.

This website is beneficial for tapping into various Multiple Intelligences as listed by educational researcher Howard Gardner.  Of Gardner’s MI seven of them are aided through activities on this website. To start, verbal/linguistic learners will benefit from the engagement in the audio podcast lesson plan and by reading and interpreting web information.  Visual/Spatial learners will benefit from seeing the images of different flutes, the digital story and from the easy to follow visual artwork of my website.  Bodily/Kinesthetic learners benefit because this student will use the mouse to navigate the site to find info but must also play their flute along with the activities of this site.  Musical/Rhythmic learners, of course, benefit from this site because students will be using this site to learn best how to use inductive and deductive reasoning through musical performance.  The Intrapersonal learner will benefit because this site engages them in self-reflection to determine if they are learning the material correctly.  Finally, this site benefits the existentialist learner because the site provides the opportunity to get a “big picture” of the flute by being introduced to learning material regarding the flute that wouldn’t typically get covered in the classroom.

This site involves the student in critical thinking.  This happens when the student uses their intelligence and prior musical knowledge to effectively deal with connecting the technical aspects of playing the flute.  Students also must think for themselves during these learning opportunities to determine if they are on track; another aspect of critical thinking.

This site was created based on the Constructivist learning theory.  To expand, this site creates opportunities for students to learn for themselves. They can use this knowledge later in their course of musical study to better their musical performance.  This site also uses the Constructivist theory of constructing knowledge because the student must use this website on their own by being responsible for their own learning outcome. Also, the final lesson plan is a group project , another feature of the Constructivist learning environment.

This site is ADA compliment by providing alternate text to support images.  Also, the provided lesson plan is in HTML format, which is more useful for those with disabilities than a pdf document.  Finally, this site will be ADA Compliant by providing text captions for the audio blog provided here.  

This site exhibits good web design for several reasons.  To start, it uses a consistent use of color and text font.  Also, all text and background colors are complimentray, yet contrasting. Any links are well presented for quick access and are labeled accordingly. All of these images are relevant to the topic of the flute.  Finally, the text is easy to read and is not encumbered by clutter of text, images or flashing and blinking images.

To start this site, I suggest you start the lesson of the history of the flute and all of the relatives in the flute family.  Then go to the digital story of great flautists.  Next get your flute ready for the audio blog on articulation.  Try the lesson plan created for your lesson group where you can show everything you’ve learned here by creating a podcast!  At the very end, feel free to take the quiz and go to the various links provided. The most important thing to do on this site is have fun, relax and hopefully, you’ll learn something new about the flute!