ABOUT CAROL BROOS

www.carolbroos.com has over 75,000 hits since its creation in September 2006. It won “Best in the Web” as the best student-centered site for 2007 by Digital Education, and it received the “School website of the week” for March 16, 2007 by TechLearning. She was a finalist for TechLearning.com “Leader of the Year – 2007” and a “Star Educator” from Discovery Education. She won the  “Golden Apple” award for 2008 and the “Mary Hoffman” award for music education excellence through IMEA. She is a “Google Certified Teacher as part of the Chicago group in 2008, only 250 teachers from across the world are GTA (Google Teacher Academy). She and the art teacher were awarded the “Larry Stilgebauer” award – honorable mention – for “The Big Picture,” from Suburban Cook County Learning Technology Center and Illinois Computing Educators. The next year, she and Brenda Muench, another music teacher from Gilman, Illinois won the top award of Explemary for “Collaborative Composer Project” from the same organization. Committed to a total arts program, she was awarded Distinguished Service to Art Education from the Illinois Arts Education Association in 2008. She one of two music teachers that are Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE) and will travel to Orlando for eight days to collaborative and share cutting edge technologies used by Apple Computer, which hosts the event. She is listed in Marquis “Who’s Who in American Women” 2008 50^th edition.

She developed a website: www.carolbroos.net a teacher-friendly website where teachers have posted their work they have completed at her presentations. She just improved her blog, by combining three blogs into one, http://www.beatechie.com

Sunset Ridge is in its fourth year collaborating with The Vermont MIDI project, is an online mentoring program for student composers. There have been two compositions performed by the junior high band, and another student created a website for “Superchord,” a composition with a story. www.chordsville.com is an amazing project and we just finished videotaping the second composition. A seventh grade student composed and performed Spring Storm at the junior high spring concert.

Social networking and collaboration is the key to music technology. She developed a ning for music techie teachers to collaborate and network. She has posted all her bookmarks on the web through del.icio.us and diigo. She loves to twitter (musictechie) and plurk (musictechie) Finally, She and three other teachers have collaborated on pod29.com for students, teachers, and parents to post movies and podcasts, a “school-tube” for Sunset Ridge District #29. Just recently, two seventh graders of Sunset Ridge won the most “learning and engagement” website from Digital Education for www.lazertron.net and flew to Hollywood to accept the award, the youngest winners in the history of the awards. It contains games, tutorials, and information for students.

She traveled to Japan on a Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund teacher scholarship in October 2006.  Her website is featured on the JFMF website.

She has published an article for Technology Institute of Music Educators (Spring 2007, Vol. 9, No, 2) titled “GarageBand, not GarbageBand.”

She taught a movie-making class as part of the Vermont MIDI Project and has presented at the Illinois Music Educators Convention (IMEA), the National Technology Institute of Music Educators (TI:ME), Ohio Music Educators Conference (OMEA), Michigan Music Educators Conference (MMEA), Illinois Technology Conference for Educators (IL-TCE), Illinois Educational Technology Conference (IETA) Music Educators National Conference (MENC) Illinois Art Education Association (IAEA) and the National Computing Educators Conference (NECC) and Midwest Band Clinic.

Finally, “Not all of us have equal talent, but all of us should have equal opportunity to develop our talent.” – John F. Kennedy