Search Front Door Kitchen SoundGarden CoffeeShop Resource Room Kids Create! Gallery Go Back CafeMuse: Front Door

Teacher's Guide

CafeMuse is designed to provide easily accessable resources, opportunities for collaboration, and sharing ideas with peers. Here are some tips on how get the most value from a visit.

TIP: this is a good page to add to your bookmarks or print out and save for easy reference.


What topics can I find in CafeMuse?

CafeMuse uses the subject of sound and music as a point of departure for a multi-disciplinary approach to learning about ourselves and the world around us. We use five primary content areas to cover this wonderful and important topic.

These primary content areas serve as organizing principles throughout the entire site.

Making Music – Who, what, when, how?

Musical Math – What does math have to do with music?

Catching Waves – How do we perceive sound?

Moving Waves – What happens when sound travels?

Making Waves – What are the basics of sound?

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What is the best way to find something in CafeMuse?

CafeMuse presents the five primary content areas in each of three virtual areas; the SoundGarden, Kitchen, and Resource Room. They are color-coded to help you find your way:

Kitchen Our fine Kitchen provides high quality "recipes" to "cook up" your own way-cool sound-things with your hands-on and minds-on. Explore our information primers, classroom lesson plans for individual and group activities, online student activities and games, and more.

SoundGarden Explore interactive resources that deal with the subjects of sound and music. Use these online activities as part of your investigations. You can use them in your classroom, living room, or online.

Resource Room Check out these bookmarks to other free Internet resources. Use them to help prepare, implement, assess your classroom investigations.

- Sound and Music Bookmarks
- Using the Internet in Your Classroom
- Basic References and Resources
- Teacher Professional Development

The above three virtual areas are complemented by two additional virtual "rooms"; the CoffeeShop, and the Kid's Create! Gallery. These are also color-coded:

CoffeeShop Come and Ask the Experts! your questions on the subject of sound and music, check out Frequently Asked Questions, or sign up for our free bi-monthly CafeMusletter.

Kids Create! Gallery When your students finish a project that contains digitized pictures, text, or sounds you can submit their work to our Gallery for public display!

The main entry point is called the Front Door:

Front Door The Front Door contains links to background pages about CafeMuse. Every page has a link to it.

Together these six areas form the primary gateways to explore the entire site.

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What is the best way to navigate?

1. There is no single best way to navigate this site. It's up to your individual learning styles.

2. We provide a navigation bar to help you explore and use this site. It is located on the upper left side of every page. It points to each of the five virtual areas and the Front Door.

3. The navigation bar contains a SEARCH button on the top. It is the quickest way to browse for relevant information until you get more familiar with the site.

Search CafeMuse Search for concepts, terms, online activities, lessons plans, etc. in CafeMuse.

TIP: after using the SEARCH feature, you may wish to use the BACK button in the top left of your browser to return to the page you were on before you started your search (as the search page can't possibly point back to every page in the site).

4. The navigation bar contains a BACK button on the bottom. Note: It is not found on the six main pages of the site (Front Door, Kitchen, SoundGarden, CoffeeShop, Resource Room, and Kid's Create! Gallery).

Go Back Go BACK to the previous page.

5. There are many links we use that point to other sites on the Internet. Those sites don't have navigational buttons back to our site. We therefore use the following:

TIP: many of the links on this page take you places on the Internet that don't have navigational buttons back to this page. If you use them, please use the BACK button on the top of your browser to return to this page and continue.

6. In addition to the navigation bar, we add a

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hyperlink that takes you to the top of each page. These internal links help you navigate up and down on some of the longer pages.

7. We also provide a series of button icons to help you recognize the different activities and media we use:

Activity: contains an online activity of some kind, etc.

Sound: contains a lesson plan

Movie: [ size in kilobytes so you can estimate how long it may take to download ]

Sound: [ size in kilobytes so you can estimate how long it may take to download ]

TIP: it takes about 20 minutes to download a 1 megabyte file (1,000,000 bytes) at 14,400 bps modem speed and roughly 10 minutes at 28,800 bps modem speed.

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How do I use RealAudio to optimize my listening pleasure in CafeMuse?

RealAudio Logo: To get the very best sound from our many audio files, you'll need to use the RealAudio Player.

To find out whether or not your computer is currently set up to use RealAudio follow this link.

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What formats does CafeMuse support?

We support those formats that provide the greatest cross platform compatibility. We want people using DOS, Windows, Macs, or Unix computers to be able to access our resources and have them maintain the same or similar look and feel.

We use the following color conventions for our HTML text:

    Hot links appear blue,

    Active links appear red,

    Visited links appear purple,

    Text appear black.

TIP: If you don't see the above text in the color stated, your browser may be set to custom colors. In order to take advantage of the above color scheme you may wish to change your browser's color settings.

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What other conventions does CafeMuse use?

Comments or questions? We'd love to hear from you. Included on the bottom of most pages is our email address:

Send your comments to: webteam@cafemuse.com

We hope you enjoy your visit with us!

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"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute,
and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
THAT's relativity."

– Albert Einstein


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