Music Is Not for Insects

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• dizzler rocks | elearning for musicIt’s inevitable that one is drawn to certain web tools and services, whilst missing out on others. I’ve not been quick to latch onto widgets but I came across dizzler.com which gets the social media thing just right for me!
• Snapshot of Listening / Buying Habits | Future Of MusicIf you look at how people are getting their music these days you see that the companies fighting for the people who pay for music are battling over an ever-smaller piece of the pie.
• No Fortissimo? Symphony Told to Keep It Down - New York TimesBut across Europe, musicians are being asked to wear decibel-measuring devices and to sit behind see-through antinoise screens. Companies are altering their repertories. And conductors are reconsidering the definition of “fortissimo.”
• Harmony Line | Compose Music Online SoftwareMusic software that lets anyone compose music. The first music software program designed to teach students and adults how to compose music simply by drawing lines on the screen.

• RECORD STORE DAY - Home

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• First Downloadable Rock Band Album: Judas Priest | Game | Life from Wired.com

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• MUSIC YOU’RE ABOUT TO LOVE on amazingtunes.comFind new music or listen to playlists you’ve made, then share your favourites with friends and other fans. Sign up, it’s free
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• Super Hot: Muxtape With Coverflow - ReadWriteWebMP3 “mix tape” site Muxtape has been my preferred source of new music for the last few weeks now…Colin Sproule has come up with a great way for Mac users to get an iTunes-style Coverflow preview of playlists on the site.

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• Macworld | Creative Notes | Songwriting with GarageBand

  First of all, I don’t go into my home recording studio and say, “OK, I’m going to write a song now.” It doesn’t work that way for me—I either feel it or I don’t. If I don’t, then a song doesn’t get written. Regardless…it always involve

• Royalty Free Music from Beatsuite.com

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• Music Tax: The iPod Approach“It is exactly this line of thinking - righteous entitlement - that leads to the idea of using taxes to support businesses that can’t support themselves. Music taxes in any form are a bad idea and always will be.”
• ACIDplanet.com: What is ACIDplanet?What is ACIDplanet? ACIDplanet.com is the Internet’s premier site for music, video and unique artists. It’s home to a growing online community of exciting, individual digital musicians and videographers. Like you.
• Grooveshark Launches Web Media PlayerFor those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale…
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Thanks to Matthew Needleman and his latest posts about differentiation for the inspiration behind today’s post. This combined with my use of Garageband in the music curriculum made for a great part 2 to my post about enhanced podcasts.

*NOTE: my apologies to those of you reading my blog in a feed reader. I have noticed that when I post podcasts and other media into an edublogs post, it doesn’t show up in Google Reader and you may need to follow a link to my blog to see the posted item.

INTRODUCTION-

As a music specialist, the challenge to create differentiated lessons for grades K-5 can be daunting. On some days I have seven preps and using technology with a seventeen year old general music curriculum is a trick.

Here is a general music lesson from the popular “World of Music” curriculum published by Silver Burdett & Ginn that I differentiated across several grade levels (citations are at the end of the post). Using Garageband, you can easily enhance and update a music listening lesson with an audio-visual component for today’s digital learners.

THE LESSON-

We start with a second grade listening lesson that uses a chart with pictures to help students follow along with a wild Shostakovich “Polka”:

Using a digital camera, I imported the pictures from the textbook into Garageband along with an mp3 of the music to create an enhanced podcast with pictures that would appear as the music was being played:

LET’S DIFFERENTIATE-

Here is where the differentiation comes in: for Grade 1, I play the Garageband project with the pictures and a “call” track I created announcing the instruments as they appear:

Click the “audio mp3″ box below to hear how this sounds:
Polka with call track

For Grade 2, we use the student text to follow along with the music; and then we play the Garageband project that looks and sounds like this below:

grade2polkalesson.m4v

For Grades 3-5, we can start having kids choose pictures as they listen to the music and drag them into a podcast track with markers:

Or differentiate even further by giving students a podcast track with no markers:

Another lesson using the same “Polka” appears in a Grade 3 listening chart with more sections and different pictures to represent the music:

Here is what that lesson looks and sounds like using more detailed descriptions:

grade3polkapodcastwmarkers.m4v

FINAL THOUGHTS-

I hope you can see how it is possible to take a typical listening lesson and use Garageband to create a visual and audio experience for general music students. Most of our kids find it hard to listen to extended periods of music. A visual component may provide the interest needed for an extended piece of music. Differentiating the lesson with various levels of participation from grade level to grade level is also achieved. My fifth graders actually create a listening lesson for my younger students using this process by choosing their own music and pictures.

Citations for textbooks:
World of Music Grade 3- (green book)
Listening Guide #4
“Pizzicato Polka” from Ballet Suite No. 1
Palmer, Mary. World of Music. Morristown: Silver Burdett & Ginn, 1991.

World of Music Grade 2- (red book)
Polka page 102 Listening Chart
Palmer, Mary. World of Music. Morristown: Silver Burdett & Ginn, 1991.

Citation for muisc:
“Polka” from the ballet The Golden Age by Dimitri Shostakovich

Related Posts:

Enhanced podcasts with Garageband: part 1

Getting your Garageband podcasts to work with Edublogs and other video hosting sites

Garageband Tip01 of several: Burn to CD without using share to iTunes

“Not that loop again, and again…”: Using Garageband responsibly to create music for your digital projects.

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

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