Our Digital Libraries

I am a big believer in the use of recordings and listening in music classrooms. Maybe this stems from the lack of it in my own music education. When I entered university I realized how little I had actually listened to music from different genres. My vocabulary and experience of music was so limited that I have been playing catch-up ever since. 
We have more resources available now than ever before when it comes to access to recorded music. There are countess music streaming sites online, Jango, 8Tracks, and Grooveshark are just a few of the websites out there. You can download music into iTunes or similar programs. We have CD's, MP3 players, iPods, and laptops that can carry music with us wherever we go. There are thousands of radio stations available and Youtube has an infinite number of live music performances waiting at the click of a mouse. 
With all of these resources students are building personal libraries of music that travel with them everyday. I think it is incredibly important that we encourage them to share their libraries with the class and with us. It's also important that we share our own music libraries with our students and help them expand their own. Youtube and iPods should be classroom resources, as well as the CDs we are more familiar with.
Current technology has made it easier than ever before to collect, share, and manipulate recordings into a personal expression of who we are. It is our responsibility to give students the opportunity to add to and share their personal digital libraries. I hope to give my students a wider exposure to music than I had, and that will be accomplished through the vast array of technology available.