Here’s some of my personal thoughts and I would love to here your Feedback on this as well.

I’m a huge fan or Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple – Intelligence and know that since I have learned about it, it has impacted the way I have worked with children and has helped me understand how I learn and why I have taken such a great interest in music.

When I found this video, I couldn’t help but listen to it over and over again and there were a number of points that I heard in it that have started me thinking again!

In This video, Howard Gardner tells us of his finding that some American youth are able to achieve an ethical outlook in their youth, but a disturbing number of American youth say “ Someday when I become Rich and famous I’ll become ethical, but for now I’ll pass and do what’s easiest for me to get the result I want”

To me, the information age has been a wonderful development as I remember the many, many hours I used to spend in libraries just looking things up and contemplating answers to my questions. I view digital media as a huge extension of a library where I can find anything I want at the touch of a button and that’s why I love to make high quality music teachers resources readily accessible on the internet. Because I see all the good sides to using the internet and use it this way all the time I forget that as our students and children delve into using digital media and becoming members of social media networks, they are faced with an enormous amount of information and with ethical issues much younger. We can now choose what we want and need to see rather than having to sit through it all regardless like we used to on TV.

Gardner briefly speaks of the notion that teachers are now coaches rather than information imparters. This notion stands out to me me very strongly and it makes me ask my self – how can we apply this to music education?

How can we get our students to self discover, and we as music educators guide them through it rather than just imparting our knowledge? What strategies do we already put in place to enable this to happen and how can we build on this knowledge?

I would love to hear how you view Gardner’s work, how you put these ideas into practice and would love you to share your stories with students using social media or other sites on the internet and ethical issues they may be facing at the moment. There’s also some discussion points at the bottom of this video which is at http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-howard-gardner-video.

I do hope you enjoy it as much as I did!