ComposeIt

Technology allows teachers to take the learning beyond the walls of the classroom.  One of our final projects for this semester's graduate class was to learn about global collaboration and create a project of our own.

In researching global collaboration, I watched a recorded session from the Global Education Conference entitled "The Universal Language of Music: Composed, Shared, and Celebrated Between Classrooms Across the World."  You can access the recording here.

This presentation provided a thorough overview of the types of collaborative projects that have been done regarding music.  It also addressed how collaborative music projects in education can address a large number of standards in a variety of subject areas as well as different learning styles.  She addressed music collaboration that occurred in the recording industry as well as a number of projects in education.  This presentation helped me refine my idea for a collaborative composition project.  She presented a program called SoundTrap that I would like to incorporate into my project because of the collaboration options that allow students to edit a composition similar to the way in which students can work together to edit a Google doc.  In addition to examples of projects, she provided a number of questions to think about when creating a collaborative project.  She even pointed out that a collaboration can be as small as working with a teacher in your building and as large as working with famous composers from around the world.

The project in the presentation that used the program SoundTrap was through the Hatch Experience. I wanted to explore more of their projects, which led me to Compose Yourself. That project and Rock Our World gave me an idea for a collaborative composition project I could do with my own students.

I call my project ComposeIt. It's a six-week collaborative composition project for 5th grade students.  They will use the program SoundTrap to compose an original work with two other groups from other classrooms.  Each week, the groups will evaluate the other two groups' work and create a video to share their thoughts.  The groups will edit and add to the work based on the student reflections and evaluations.  At the end of the six-week project, the students will have a completed digital composition.

I plan to test the project out with my district colleagues first in the spring.  It'll be an awesome way for our students to work together and will give me a chance to work the bugs out of the project before branching out to schools around the world!

How would you expand your students' learning beyond the walls of your classroom?

Go with the flow!

That feeling you get when you are totally absorbed in whatever you are doing - reading a book, watching a tv series, playing a video game. That feeling is something called flow.

In my grad class, we were tasked with an interesting assignment: play a video game. But why? Why would a teacher assign a video game for homework? To try and tap into that idea of flow! That feeling that our students already enjoy in their free time! Why WOULDN'T we find a way to tap into that!

I already love playing games in my classroom! One of the favorites in my classroom is Staff Wars, but I'm always on the lookout for new games!

What games do you use with your students?

Smoosh It!!

The more I work with technology, the more possibilities I discover! I've had plenty of moments where I'm using an app to create something but find that it'll only do part of what I want. So I finish that part and then move it into another app to do more. Apparently, this has a name: App Smashing!

For one of my grad classes, we had to create a final product using app smashing. Jared decided that a final product of app smashing should be called a smoosh, so we created a smoosh!

Step one: figure out what our smoosh would be! I'm in the middle of program prep and he's working with little kiddos all day so we decided to find a smoosh that I could use to have my students self-assess their progress and used apps that he could have little kids play with!

The apps:

Voice Recorder - I used this app to record my students singing one of the songs they were working on.

Safari - I used this app next to find an image to animate. Safari allows you to search for open source images so we wouldn't have to worry about copyright issues.

Photos - I used this app to crop the image of extra "stuff."

Animate Me - We played with a few apps for animation and settled on this one. The free version us a number of limitations, including an audio time limit of ten seconds, so Jared upgraded to the full version for $0.99. This app was fun to play with! We could animate faces over our image, record audio, speed things up/slow things down, and more! We used both phones to record the audio from my phone to the app on his phone. Jared then added a face and animation to our image. Bam!! Smoosh created!

YouTube - Next, I uploaded the video from my phone files to my YouTube account.

Blogger - Final step is to make it public and share the fun!!

So now I get to share our awesome smoosh with all of you!!

https://youtu.be/ohY5Hm2xOrM

I used the normal version to have the students self-assess their progress and work on fixing some mistakes during rehearsal, but they enjoyed this chipmunk version as well!!

To my fellow educators, how would you use app smashing in your classroom?

Group Project Time

It's group project time in one of my grad classes!  We worked in small groups to use a variety of media applications and create this end result!  A Google Form to survey our classmates, tweeted out the form link, Google Presentation to compile and present our results, Jing to create a screen capture of our presentation, and now Blogger to put our results out there!  Such a great project to get students involved in using all of these tools!!









Link to our project document.

To Use or Not to Use?

As I dive into this blogging endeavor (and Twitter, Diigo, etc…), I’m still trying to figure out how to make it all work for my classroom.  With so many social media outlets, how do I make it all connect?  How do I make it all meaningful?  What impact is all of this really going to have on my classroom?

We live in a world where people are connected ALL THE TIME!  My students are no different.  They are probably much more connected than I am!  That’s pretty scary considering my students are elementary-aged!  My students are on Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat, and so many more.  All the time!  Since my students aren’t technically old enough (according to many social media policies that state you must be at least 13 years old to use their services), I can’t really use those things with my students in my classroom.  Here’s an interesting article on why age restrictions exist on social media sites but how poorly they are policed.

So how does social media affect the elementary classroom?  We can connect with the parents!  I love taking videos of the activities we do in class and sending the links out to the parents.  We made a ton of video clips last year and put them together into a presentation video for our school board to share our new curriculum.

We use facebook to keep our parents informed.  Everybody knows the students that NEVER manage to get a note home.  This gives parents another avenue to find out the information they might not have otherwise seen.  It’s also a great way to send out reminders as events get closer or post links for parents to sign up as volunteers.

I’ll use my blog to keep all of the amazing resources I find in one place.  GoNoodle was a lifesaver yesterday.  Anyone in teaching (or healthcare) can tell you that a full moon definitely has an impact!  My kids needed that extra movement!

Here’s a great blog post with amazing ideas for using social media at the elementary level!

So how do you use social media either in your classroom (if you’re an educator) or to connect with your child’s school/teacher (if you’re a parent)??

Are you ready to GoNoodle?!

Fidgeting through a meeting that you’ve lost interest in?  Maybe it’s because the topic doesn’t seem relevant to you.  Maybe it’s because you can’t stop running through your to-do list in your head.  Maybe it’s because you simply can’t sit still for that long.

We’ve all been there!  Working in an elementary school, I know my students reach that point, too!

I follow an amazing music teacher’s blog (http://kristinlukow.blogspot.com/) and stumbled across this brain break idea.  What kid (or adult) doesn’t need to get up and move every once in awhile??!

I teach music, a subject that typically has my students up and moving for a good portion of the time.  Not every class or subject has that luxury.  Instead, the original post Ms. Lukow linked to (http://blog.gonoodle.com/2015/02/10-ways-to-gonoodle-for-beginners/) suggests having kids take mini brain breaks to help get them refocused for the day!

So how does it work?  You simply create a free account at http://www.gonoodle.com - you can sign up as a parent/kid or as a teacher - and play away!  They have a wide range of activities that get kids dancing, stretching, and wiggling away!  I was excited to see all of the mega mixes for indoor recess!  Bring on the rain and the freezing temperatures!

What other ideas do you have to get kids up and moving and keep them focused in the classroom??