Web Site Critique: Music Cards

www.musiccards.net

This site is entirely comprised of musical flashcards and quizzes for your students do either in the classroom or at home. The flashcards are highly customizable and can be used with any level of student.

Note Names

I did this tutorial myself. The cards are rollovers, so that once you place yours mouse on the card, the answer is revealed. I like these a lot because you can customize exactly what you want to review via the dropdown menu at the bottom of the page. You can test over the treble clef, just natural notes, and on accidentals as well. I like that the student will be able to focus only on one type of test at a time, it lessens confusion and further reinforces the exact concept.

Triads

This review would be good for most college freshman, as well as the advanced HS student. These cards present a variety of triads, including major, minor, diminished and augmented chords. The chords are also presented in all three forms of inversion. This is a great review!

Piano Note Names

This is another great review for the beginning keyboard player. Again, some college freshman could also benefit from this site. These flash cards help you to train one to find notes on the piano or keyboard quickly after seeing them on the musical staff.

Guitar

Although not normally taught in the public music education classroom, this site also offers guitar flashcards that review notes as well as being able to find pitches on a fingerboard. Having taken recreational music, a course here at WT that requires a guitar midterm and final, I can absolutely see the value of the portion of the site.

Just simply getting the students to understand and interpret musical symbols is one of the most challenging parts of teaching beginning band. I already use homemade flashcards with all of my private students. How nice it would have been to avoid the paper cuts and my horrible artwork had I already known about this site.

The site is very simple, but that is also why it is so easy to use and navigate. Besides, when asking students to use outside learning tools, the simpler they are, the better. I really enjoyed and benefited from this site and I would absolutely recommend this to my students and fellow educators.