MY ONLINE LEARNING CHALLENGE - PART 1

I confess; I spend too much time online. Or rather, I spend too much time procrastinating online. Not always of course: writing emails, ordering materials for school, researching lesson plans; my inner police officer accepts all that. Then the officer takes a hike and I find myself engrossed in the latest episode of Mad Men or the Mentalist. These series are more addictive than cheese and onion crisps. Last night I watched the final episode of the Mentalist. Yes! I finally know who Red John is, I know what happened to Lisbon and Patrick, I need not to watch any longer - I am released...

So now what? At school I am continuously promoting digital technology; how wonderful it is! The things you can learn! The open educational resources! So why do I turn into a series-zombie at home?! My inner police officer won't allow it any longer. I need a challenge. I want to use the online technology to my disposal, in order to learn a new skill. But what? From the corner of the guest room, my sadly forgotten and dusty guitar is calling my name. She's done that before, but her rusty call was never loud enough. Until today; I am going to learn to Play the Guitar. Today it is November 9th, the first day of my online learning challenge.

TUNING
My 30 year-old guitar first needs tuning. I must have learned this a long long time ago, when I was about 12. I remember I'm supposed to play something like a chord that has to sound the same as another chord, or something like it. My guitar lessons being ancient history, there surely must be an easier way nowadays...? I first tried YouTube, tuning my guitar listening to the correctly tuned strings on one of numerous free YouTube websites, such as http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/Lessons/Tuning_Your_Guitar_By_Ear.html by a friendly sounding guy called Kirk Lorange. You have to have a pretty good ear to tune your guitar this way, but I thought I was doing rather well. After having done exactly as Kirk said, I thought I was ready for the next step. I found another website by Marty Schwartz, called Beginner Guitar Lessons - that sounded just about right. Upon trying the very first chord, the simplest of basic chords called E Minor, I realised that my E Minor sounded very different from Marty's E Minor. I had the right fingers in the right position, but my cat looked at me like I was stringing up his next-door feline mate.

I needed serious tuning assistance here; what I wanted was someone or something to give me real-time feedback. I looked for an app and found just the right thing - yes, for free! It is called Guitar Tuna, and after I gave the tuna permission to use my microphone, I found myself tuning each string to perfection, helped by a kind of Geiger teller kind of graphic, that goes into red whenever I am out of tune (too high or too low) and that emits a satisfied little noise whenever my pitch is just right. It actually worked! Now I was ready for the next round.

I went back to Marty Schwartz's Beginner Guitar Lessons. The guy sounds amazing and he makes it sound so easy to do what he does... I wanted to follow him straight into 'Let it Be' by the Beatles. Marty says it's only four chords, played in various orders. I can surely do that. Then I realised that this Beginner Lesson was not Beginner enough for me, as Marty didn't even stop to explain what on earth a C chord was. I stopped the video and rewound, trying to make sense of his finger positions. I couldn't see whether that ring finger was pushing down on one of the strings or simply hovering above it. Rewind... and again.  Then Marty played another chord and again another one. Whoa! I lost track. Ok, I really needed to rewind and first get to grips with some basic chords - literally.

I typed in Basic Guitar Chords for Beginners and that brought me straight to http://www.cyberfret.com/guitar-chords/7-basic-guitar-chords-for-beginners. Just what I needed!
It teaches the first basic chords, and more importantly it showed me how to read guitar chord charts, such as the one on the left for E Minor. the strings coincide with my guitar strings, left to right being top - down. the numbers below correspond with my fingers, the first being the index finger, the second your middle finger, third is ring finger and fourth is your pinky. When it says 0 no finger touches that string. One mystery was solved, when it says X, that string is not played. I got the basics covered! After that I learned my first two chords. E Minor and C Chord.


Now I'll spend next week practicing, because I urgently need to grow some callus on my fingers; they hurt by now! Still, this feeling of actually having learned something new really beats watching the final episode of the Mentalist. Oh well, it's a tie :-)