Digital Photographs

Digital photography is a massively huge development that we now tend to take for granted. As someone who went to a tiny cash strapped elementary school and experienced some of the old technology and alternatives, I can say that digital photos make education much easier and more flexible. Traditional photos are fragile, easily misplaced, and only editable by physically altering them. Digital photos make it easy to take all or part of a photograph or digital graphic and quickly clip and edit it for a specific use. In music history these days, every lesson is accompanied by pictures of people, buildings, the artwork and architecture of the times, and so forth. It really adds to the lesson, especially comparing music with the art and architecture of the period.

While instrumental music has often tended towards just rehearsing and performance, images certainly have application. We spend all this time talking about visual analogies, but would it not be effective for visual learners especially to show images? Impressionist art and impressionist music, for example, compliment each other nicely in terms of teaching style.

Of course, one has to watch out for copyright, but digital images are easily accessible, customizable, and usable in the classroom.