gearpipe.org

For those of you not following me on Twitter…what are you waiting for? You can find all of my tweets and updates by following @GearPipeDotOrg.

As you know, I have very specific goals here on gearpipe.org. Each month, I pick one music education charity to support. I know there are many deserving charities out there, but I think that I can do more by focusing my energies each month one of specific project.

On my Twitter feed, however, I want to be a directory for all music education news and links. My goal is to make my Twitter feed only about 10% gearpipe.org content, and the rest will be general music education happenings.

If you’re a Twitter novice, you might not be familiar with the hastags system. It’s quite simple. If you want people who are interested in the subject of your tweet to find it, you can tag it with a certain term (like music, tennis, or cooking). In your tweet, that term is an active link, and by clicking it you can see all other tweets using that term.

I was a bit disappointed to find that there was no widespread use of a hashtag for music education. My disappointment then turned to excitement when I realized that I could spearhead the effort to start one. I chose #MusicEd. So, if you’re tweeting anything related to music education, please include #MusicEd somewhere in your tweet so we can all follow you.

I’m excited that after only a few days some people have already begun to use it, including @musicedconsult and @Take_Lessons. To check out all of the posts using the #MusicEd hash tag, you can see them here.

Today I am proud to announce our partners for the first month of gearpipe.org: Little Kids Rock and Musicians Friend.

Since you’re all new here, I’ll cover how this website works. Each month, we raise money for one deserving music education charity. Instead of asking you for donations, we also partner up with one musical instruments retailer, who will set aside a percentage of the sales from gearpipe.org readers for donation. Everyone got it?

So, our first music education charity is Little Kids Rock. I first met LKR founder David Wish nearly five years ago when I was working in marketing for Fender. I could tell then that he was very passionate about the issue of shrinking school music budgets and that he also had the business sense to do something about it. Little Kids Rock has grown a lot since, and I’m proud that we’re going to help them grow even more.

Little Kids Rock has dedicated themselves to bringing free musical instruments and music instruction to underserved schools across the country. Ultimately, their goal is to restore music to its rightful place in the academic lives of all kids in our public schools.
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