A friend referred me to a very interesting site for guitar enthusiasts the other day called Chord Book It has many features, the most immediately useful of which for pupils is an online tuner.The beauty of this is that you can click R (for repeat) for each string and hear the note for as long as you need. In addition to standard tuning, it also features 7 altered tunings and the option to create your own by altering the virtual pegs. At any point, you can click strum to hear how your creation will sound.

Other features include chords, scales and some backing tracks for jamming. These features are very well laid out and intuitive to use so I won’t go on at length. Let me just recommend exploring the inversions feature on the chord page and point out that the virtual guitar neck can be reoriented for left-hand players.

From the home page, you can access some video lessons. While I would never discourage anyone from enjoying these, I feel that they (and I am referring to the the genre and not these specifically these lessons) have their limits. While affording a source of ideas and inspiration they are necessarily about someone else playing and not you. This type of situation has been summed up by a mind greater than mine:

“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” - Chinese proverb, sometimes attributed to Confucius around 450 BC.

Categories: Active Learning, Digital Literacy, Enquiry-based learning, Music