How did you spread the word about your Battle of the Bands video? We are spreading the word EVERYWHERE!! We are using multiple facebook fan pages and our own profiles to promote the video. We also posted it on websites and blogs. We are also hoping to get support from our schools, who have held assemblies to play our past video. So far, they've helped us by sending the dosomething link out to the whole mailing list. On Friday April 16th the video was presented for Fontbonne University's (St Louis, MO) Excellence in Student Scholarship event and was awarded first place! We are, of course, telling EVERYONE we know, and we are hoping that DoSomething and the Jonas Brothers will help by sending emails/tweets about our video as they've done for some of the others!

Did you use social media to get more eyes on your video? How? Absolutely. The new video was added to our YouTube page, which already has followers because of our video from last year. The comments we have on that page are amazing and prove how important and inspirational our video is. We also have a few Facebook fan pages between us, including HearingExchange Teens and Sophie's Tales. We have also been tweeted by @hearingexchange. We have all invited our friends to view the video, and because of that it's been blogged about. Most recently, we've started using Tumblr. After sending out a press release about our video, it can now be found on hundreds of websites including many blogs and listserves.

Why is music education important to you? Music education is so important to us because it can make a HUGE difference in the lives of kids with hearing loss. If no one takes the time to introduce them to music, kids with hearing loss might not develop the same appreciation for music as hearing kids do, even with amazing cochlear implant and hearing aid technology. Yet, if they do learn to love music, it could improve their lives in a lot of ways! It will improve their auditory listening skills and social skills in big ways. We feel that this is definitely where music education money should be spent first. There are numerous studies that back this up- many of our fans are sharing what they know about music education and its effects on kids with hearing loss. Here's what one of our fans, Dan, said: "The latest R&D coming out of University of Washington and (especially) Northwestern U is that music appreciation is tied to speech discrimination in noise. This has a *direct* impact on why music should be taught in schools, especially to those that have hearing or other related disorders."

Tell us more about the group or type of musical performance in your video: Our video features many types of musical performance. We all help singing, but Dani, a voice student at Long Island High School for the Arts (LIHSA) is our lead singer. She also lays the main guitar track, while David keeps the beat with his drumming. Later, he and Sara add some extra guitar, and Dani comes back with piano. Jake even added his trumpet to the mix! We feel that we have a really special group of kids involved with this video. Though some of us have normal hearing and others are deaf, we ALL agree that it does not matter HOW a person hears- it just matters that everyone accepts each other and communicates! We also represent a big age range- everything from a college junior, a high school senior, to an 8th grader, 4 7th graders, 1 6th grader, and of course, our little star: Kindergartner Daniel! (And two dogs for some added humor!)

Anything else we should know about your Battle of the Bands video project? We want you to know that our dream is to re-record the video with the Jonas Brothers. They have done a phenomenal job of raising awareness about different causes including diabetes, Down Syndrome, and "going green." We really hope they will consider adding hearing loss awareness to this list! It would be a dream come true to hear "That's Just the Way We Hear" played at one of their concerts, on JONAS, or on the Disney Channel. If this happened, it could change the way an entire generation views deafness, disability, and differences in general. We also want to remind you to turn on the captioning! Unlike many videos found on YouTube, we took the time to make our video accessible to EVERYONE by adding captioning. Now everyone can understand our message loud and clear!