Monthly Archives: March 2015

ICT, Keezy, Loopy, Music

Using ICT in Primary Music – with Musical Futures

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As the music leader at my school I was on the look out for some training that would give me some ideas that I could use in my own teaching and pass on to other members of staff.  Thanks to twitter I came across a course called Finding Your Voice, run by Musical Futures. You can find out all about them by visiting their website for yourself (and I recommend that you do) but given the course outline it seemed perfect for my needs.

Today I attended this training and was not disappointed. They gave us loads of practical tips and activities to try in our schools but also a range of different ICT that they use to support Music teaching. This was particularly helpful for schools with limited resources and budgets. Again, check their website for the resources, including some excellent vocal warm-ups, but I wanted to use this post to share some of the ICT used and suggest some that I use already.

LOOPY – app

loopy

Loopy, as the name suggests, is used for looping sounds. There are a few looping apps available for iOS but this one is particularly child-friendly. I’ve long since been a big fan of Keezy, but Loopy offers quite a bit more. Unlike Keezy, Loopy allows you to actually loop, making composition easier and you can also get a rather handy metronomic count in. Create music by layering looped recordings of singing, beatboxing or playing an instrument.

A top tip is to go to settings and switch the ‘monitoring’ and ‘live input recording’ to off before recording, in order to avoid feedback. Loopy is available from the from the App Store for £2.29.

SoundCloud

soundcloud

 

We all worry about how we show progress. James Emberley, the secondary music teacher who delivered the Musical Futures training, presented SoundCloud as part of the solution. It is an online audio distribution platform that enables the user  to upload, record, promote and share their originally recordings.

Record at the start of a scheme of work as a baseline and then record again a few weeks later. Hey-presto PROGRESS recorded, without the need for the student to write anything down. If you record using the free AudioCopy app, you can upload directly to SoundCloud.

Launchpad – by Novation – app

launchpad

I have been using Launchpad for a while to create compositions across a variety of genres including Hip Hop, Trance and Drum & Bass. You can build layers and make arrangement without the fear of going out of time.

We’ve used it this year with our Year 3s as accompaniment to their performance poetry. It’s been great for teaching the children about tempo especially, but also dynamics, structure and texture.

Others…

As I come across more apps and tools that I particularly like I will update this post, but for now, here are some other apps worth exploring. GarageBand, Drummer (by Keezy) and the guitar and piano apps by Smule. While these other blogs have more useful suggestions Musical Futures and a couple from Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.

ICT, Literacy

ICT across the curriculum

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Following my previous blog post about using ICT in Literacy this post aims to cover the whole primary curriculum! Now, this is far too broad an area to put into one post, also there are far better informed bloggers and tweeters than me with websites which are designed to offer far more ideas. However I will simply share a few of my favourite websites, apps, tools and devices which can be used across a range of subjects. This has come about as part of a training session I ran for some Schools Direct students.

Padlet

Padlet is an on-line pin board. It’s free and perfect for collaborative learning  across a range of subjects. You can simply share the URL with your class and they can all add thoughts, research, links, photos, etc to share with the class.

Alternatively, the children can use it as a very simple website of their own allowing them to build on-line research pages, like a mood-board or montage for DT ideas.

Here is an example writing Alan Peat’s De-De sentences.

Socrative

Socrative is a FREE web based service which allows you to write quizzes which can be shared with your class. The results are then collated into a spread sheet for you to get instant feedback. Brilliant for AfL, and lots of fun. You can also find Socrative quizzes which have already been made by other teachers.

Once I shared this with the students I was training, one of them then shared something similar they had been using with me. Kahoot is also free and web based but is even more visually appealing and simple to use.

Skitch

Skitch can be used to label pictures, websites, maps and PDFs on iOS and Android devices. @IanAddison has written a rather useful guide to using Skitch on his blog, so check it out.

YAKiT Kids

Children and adults alike will love playing with YAKit on the iPad. It allows you to add an animated mouth to absolutely anything and record speech to make it come to life. Great fun and a brilliant way to encourage those less confident in speaking to the class. Fantastic for practising short dialogues also as you can have two objects speaking in the same scene.

P.E.

Get the children to film themselves and view it back to accelerate progress. We’ve long since used peer assessment to help children understand their strengths and weaknesses. Getting them to film themselves and watch the results has really helped my class, particularly in dance and gymnastics. This can be applied across the curriculum, as being able to see where we are going wrong enables you to put it right.

And finally a really great idea I got from @leah_moo is to use ‘Just Dance’ to teach dance routines, as PE warm ups or as a little light relief. To get you in the mood, here is the Macarena, hundreds more are available, many can be linked to topics and most are more current than this example!

Literacy

The Power of the Pen

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This is a tale about finding the right motivation for your children and enjoying the results. Pen licenses are not a new idea, but I have been staggered by the affect they have had on my class.

I was getting frustrated that the writing in handwriting books was not being applied across the all of the writing the children were doing. Some children tried to present their work neatly all of the time, but most got lazy, sloppy and tended to rush their work at times. That was until I told them they would be given a fountain pen if they were able to show consistently neat work, and by jingo, it worked.

The impact was instant. All of the class upped their game. This impact was increased further when the first 3 pens were given out and they became a prized and highly sort after possession.

Handwriting 1 Handwriting 2

Pen licenses gave a really quick fix to a niggling problem and allows us to focus of other areas of writing to improve upon. The knock on effect is that the children are also taking more care about their spelling and use of punctuation.

The pens themselves are fairly cheap, plastic fountain pens and given out in assembly by the Head to add to the sense of achievement.

Handwriting Pen