With the internet now at student's fingertips, it leaves teachers fighting against hundreds of smartphones for attention. One music professor at State College of Florida, decided to stop fighting the trend.

  • Local professor wrote Interactive Listening
  • Textbook relies heavily on online resources, including videos
  • Pete Carney is a professor at State College of Florida

For years Pete Carney taught his music students using traditional methods and classroom textbooks, but he wasn't satisfied. 

"It wasn't working for me, it wasn't working for my students, it's not teaching them how to listen to music," he explained. "It's not teaching them to appreciate what's going on in music, it's mostly just biographical stuff about people who wrote music."

After he began incorporating YouTube videos and phones into the classroom his suspicions were confirmed. It wasn't the music that his students were not interested in, just the format. He then started piecing together his first version of Interactive Listening, a textbook that's more of a framework and relies on videos, songs, and hands-on activities.

"Rather than giving them information that's prepackaged, what if we kind of surf the internet and learn how to judge information, and be responsible for gathering our own ideas," he said.

The book was a hit. Last year, it was named the state's official textbook for high school and middle school music courses. Carney says there's professors across the country who are reaching out to him too, using the book in schools in New York and North Carolina.

"I feel like it's a little bit of a risk to put your name on something, and I was scared... there's many times I was scared of what this would do to my career, but I found there was a lot of people receptive to it," he said.

Carney says he will keep working to make the book better and better.

His next step? Incorporating more about music from across the world.