On any given school day, Eakin Elementary School music teacher Rita Black sings, dances, marches, jumps, twirls, claps and plays instruments to engage her students in class.

As in decades past, her students play “Hot Cross Buns”on recorders and shake jazz hands in recitals, but the overall learning environment in music education is changing. Metro schools encourage technology-enhanced learning, and in response, Eakin Elementary and Edison Elementary are participating in a pilot program for Quaver Music — a technology-based curriculum that incorporates multimedia resources like interactive whiteboards and mobile devices to spark students’ interest in music. Seven other schools in Davidson County are also using the program, along with 1,500 schools nationwide.

In 2010, Quaver co-creators Dave Mastran and Graham Hepburn partnered with music teachers from across the country to assess the needs of struggling school music programs and found that curriculum “delivery was outdated.”

In response, Mastran and Hepburn put together a team of Nashville songwriters, graphic artists, animators, Web developers and video editors to create a music curriculum from their headquarters on Music Row. The team produced a program that incorporates virtual resources like online music laboratories, recording studios and composition tools for students and teachers that meet the Common Core and National Association of Music Education standards, as well as the National Coalition for Core Arts standards.

“We were not trying to reinvent notes, rests, lines and spaces, but we wanted to find a way to teach kids how to love music with 21st-century resources,” Hepburn says.

Hepburn, a comedian in England turned music teacher, writes and performs in all of the lesson plan DVDs. Mastran, retired founder and CEO of Maximus, a social welfare privatization firm, runs the business side of things.

Using colorful digital aids, teachers interact with students. Hepburn describes a Quaver lesson that teaches “beat” to students:

“Kids get up, move around, waddle, quack, sit down and play an interactive game, stand and sing a traditional song together, circle up to listen to a folk song, then finish off by dancing to ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,’ all while clapping to what they’re learning to be a steady beat.”

A series of screens, short interactive videos and online resources supplement a teacher’s curriculum. The program covers vocal warm-ups to vocabulary in a series of multimedia outlets. With the QArcade, for example, students work against the clock on classroom computers to match musical symbols like fermata, rests and notes to earn points while learning theory.

“Quaver does for music what Bill Nye did for science — gets kids excited about it,” Black says. “I like how the lesson plans are compiled and ready to be customized to my classroom.”

Mayor Karl Dean’s “Music Makes Us” (MMU) initiative, which rolled out during the 2012 school year, partners Metro Nashville Public Schools, music industry personalities and community leaders who are committed to making Nashville a worldwide leader in music education. Last year, MMU announced “launching and refining contemporary music programs” as a 2012-13 strategic priority. With digital music technologies like Quaver booming nationally, MMU plays an advisory role in making teachers aware of what products are available to enhance their teaching.

“MMU is strengthening traditional school music while adding a contemporary curriculum that embraces new technologies and reflects a diverse musical landscape. We’re open to having teachers have the option of implementing programs like Quaver in their classroom,” says Laurie Schell, director of Music Makes Us.

Prices range from $10 for a year of access to a single online lesson — such as “beat” or “tempo” or “duration” — to a $4,995 comprehensive package.

“At this time we don’t have the funds available to purchase it on a district-wide basis,” Schell says, “but we do want to make sure if there is the capacity and capability in the schools, that it’s on a list of approved software purchases, if they choose to do so.”

In April, the MMU Advisory Council held a technology roundtable discussion. The advisory council is appointed by Mayor Dean and Jesse Register, director of Metro schools, to represent a cross-section of music industry professionals, K-12 educators, philanthropic leaders, community stakeholders and members of higher education. The council assessed broad questions such as how technology should be used in the classroom and in different tiers — elementary, middle and high school.

“The roundtable discussion spawned several follow-up questions and it is an ongoing discussion within our larger strategic plan over the next year,” Schell says.