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?
