Jonesieblog

Today I had my first day of training as a Glow mentor.  I’ve seen the portal before, but things have progressed over the last few months and it was useful to see what is possible now.

RSS feeds and widgets can now be inserted easily into pages, which is very cool.

My job over the next wee while will be to educate other teachers (and pupils?) about Glow, and to lead by example in putting it to effective use in the learning and teaching process.  Whilst this is a daunting prospect, I’m looking forward to taking on such a positive role - it’s all too easy to slip into the usual teacherly pass-time of moaning and criticising!

Stumble it!

I started the functions topic with my S4 credit class on Friday (crazy that we leave it ’til now to formally introduce the notion of a function) and I came across this web comic today.  Kismet.

I wonder if any of the class will be able to follow the explanation?

Stumble it!

I was in Sounds Instrumental this afternoon, which is always a pleasure.  I was ostensibly there to buy a tuner for my mandolin, but took the opportunity to try out a Bouzouki (need longer fingers!) and browse through the music books.

This collection of Scottish tunes caught my eye:

There is really no need for me to buy this book.  One website alone - www.thesession.org - has more tunes than I could ever learn, and probably has many of the tunes in this book, but that doesn’t stop me wanting it!  It feels great, and the pages of musical score look fabulous.  I didn’t buy it, but as I type this I’m beginning to regret it.

(I have hotlinked to the image on the Highland Music Trust site, which is in general a bad thing to do, but I’m guessing they’ll forgive me since I’m giving their beautiful book a free plug). 

Stumble it!

I wasn’t really meaning to write a new tune, and you might argue that it stretches the imagination to describe this as “new”, but here’s a wee ditty that came to me today. I can just picture the Morris dancers clashing sticks to this

maypole midi

Stumble it!

As promised long ago, here are the midi file and score for a wee hornpipe I wrote before christmas.  To be honest, I’m not sure if it sounds better as a hornpipe or played straight like a reel.  Either way, hope you enjoy it

My first hornpipe

midi file

Stumble it!