Musical Futures International - a year of evolution.

It's been a big year at Musical Futures International HQ! New PD structure, new resources platform, new team.

Here's a summary of what went down:

Events

In 2024, we hosted the following events. We met amazing music educators doing incredible things in their schools at:

The Big Gig Kobe, Japan 

The Big Gig Mumbai, India 

The Big Gig Bangkok, Thailand 

The Winter Jam, Melbourne, Australia 

The Winter Jam, Auckland, New Zealand 

Listen & Play Your Way, Sydney, Australia 

 The Big Gig Phnom Penh, Cambodia 

If you attended one of these events, make sure you've joined us over on Facebook to stay in touch! If you're interested in levelling up your teaching in 2025, check out our events here.

The major change for 2025 is the introduction of the new Musical Futures Certification Levels. This means that any PD you do includes a certification at one of the three levels - helping you to track your PD and make sure you cover all of the bases as you implement things with your students.

Resources

In mid-2024, we launched our new resources subscription platform. The platform is a beautiful teacher-centric system for engaging your students in learner-led music activities. You are the expert and these resources should support YOU! 

The new platform has EVERYTHING we've ever created, plus we recently launched some new playalongs and have so much in store for 2025!

New resources for 2025 include:

• Our brand new music technology unit called 'Recreate', which is grounded in the Electronic Music Pedagogy approach. It's not just tutorials for how to use GarageBand...we have a full suite of expertly crafted videos for students to develop their skills on ANY platform, including some popular hardware.
• An epic new Play Now platform - such a great one for your secondary school students!
• Everyone Can Play extensions for Ukulele, Keyboard, Guitar and Bass.
• A brand new 'Steps to Songwriting' resource.
• Lots more!

Organisational Changes

Some key facts about organisational changes to Musical Futures International Inc:

1. We are now a completely internally funded not-for-profit organisation. Your professional learning & subscription fees are immediately reinvested into new resource development and/or organisational costs (insurances, website hosting, accounts, staffing etc). We are registered with the state of New South Wales in Australia.
2. Musical Futures International is the umbrella organisation for the Musical Futures globally. We currently have offices in Newcastle, Australia and Bangkok, Thailand, and host professional learning events around the world! Reach out if you'd like to have Musical Futures come to your city.
3. We are a separate organisation to Musical Futures Online (UK). Our subscription platforms are separate, with ours catering to a global audience, especially Australia/NZ and International Schools. Our organisation is pedagogy-focused and works collaboratively with a number of universities to engage with the latest research around informal learning.
4. We currently have a volunteer team overseeing the day-to-day administration of Musical Futures International. We pay our Musical Futures 'guides' as independent contractors. Each of these individuals are Level 3 certified with hundreds of hours teaching music in school classrooms, using informal learning approaches with the Musical Futures International resources.
5. Being a not-for-profit, our core mission is to see music teachers supported in helping young people to make the music they want to make. If you need support with this, please reach out any time and we'll see how we can help!

We look forward to seeing how our incredible Music Futures teacher community continues to embed informal learning and learner-centred approaches in 2025. If you want to keep up-to-date with everything, please sign up using the form below.