Music Is Not for Insects

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

Enhanced Podcasts with Garageband are a powerful way for you or your students to create some projects that are rich with content. Here is a quote from the Apple web-site:

Enhancing Your Podcast Episode with Artwork and Chapters

Podcasts are about more than just audio. You can also include artwork and links to websites to enrich the meaning of your content. And you can create chapters so your audience can move between the sections of your episode.

Below is an example of an Enhanced Podcast I created. Watch it one time straight through (it’s less than 30 seconds);

then watch it again and pause along the way to access links or move between chapters and see how an Enhanced Podcast described above looks and feels.

enhanced-podcast.m4v

Since Garageband podcasts are optimized for viewing in iTunes, Enhanced Podcasts with links to websites and chapters will look different when uploaded as m4v files (see my post on how to do this). Here are some screen shots comparing an Enhanced Podcast in iTunes and the one above embedded into Edublogs.

First, a screen shot from iTunes.

And here is what the links look like when uploaded and embedded as an m4v file:

Either way, when you click on the link in iTunes or an m4V file, if you are connected to the internet, your browser will open and take you to the web-site you have designated.

Here’s how chapters look in an Enhanced Podcast in iTunes:

Chapters in m4v files look different:

Chapters allow you to go to a specific sections in your podcast. Very handy for a long podcast that needs some indexing.

A final note about appearance: with Garageband, any artwork you have loaded into your podcast track will look “normal” when played back or “shared” out to iTunes. For some reason, when you upload a podcast as an m4v file here in Edublogs, the pictures are a bit “distorted” or may look slightly pixelated.

I have been able to upload Garageband podcasts to Ourmedia.org without this problem. See my Enhanced Podcast here without distortion:
Enhanced Garageband Podcast

More about video sharing sites and podcasts in Part 2…

Related Posts:
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

Sue Waters has an excellent post about embedding videos directly to your blog posts here at Edublogs. For those of you using Garageband to create podcasts, you may have found that things don’t work quite right when you try to embed your Garageband created podcasts directly into a post on Edublogs.

Well thanks to the excellent forums here at Edublogs, I found the answer to my problem. For those of you having trouble uploading podcast created in Garageband to other video sharing sites, this may solve your problem as well.

THE PROBLEM: When you create a podcast in Garageband-and then Share it to iTunes, the file is saved as an AAC audio file in your iTunes library. When you upload this file to Edublogs or any other site that will host your digital content, the actual extension for your newly created podcast is .m4a. For some reason, .m4a files work fine on Macs using iTunes or Quicktime, but don’t translate well or are not supported by many video sharing sites such as Teacher Tube. You can convert the file to an mp3 format, but you will lose any pictures from your podcast track. You can convert it to a .mov file, but I found that the pictures and the audio do not line up right.

SOLUTION: Change the file extension from .m4a to .m4v. Here is how I do it.

1. Create my podcast with pictures and audio in Garageband-

2. Share the file to iTunes

3. Drag the file from iTunes to the desktop so it is easy to find.

4. Change the file extension from .m4a to m4v by

a. cntrl click or right click on the file- get info-change .m4a to .m4v

b. click on “use .m4v”

5. You are done.

Now you can upload it to Edublogs or another digital content hosting site and it should work. Below is a podcast I uploading directly to Edublogs (see Sue Waters post here on how to embed video into your blog posts) and I was able to host the same .m4v file at ourmedia.org with no issues.

Handel Podcast test changing m4a to m4v

Related Posts:
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

I have been using GarageBand on a regular basis in my general music classroom with 4th and 5th grade students for several months now and have found it to be more than just a “fun” program for creating clever songs using loops and jingles.
This will be the first of several posts devoted to my use of GarageBand in the classroom. Some may be in the form of tips where I pose a problem and solution. Others may be more detailed lessons.
This first post is a tip: How to Burn a CD direct from GarageBand without using share to iTunes

PROBLEM: You have some extended audio you want to quickly burn to CD. You use GarageBand to record your project to a single audio track. You can easily share your project to iTunes using share>send to iTunes>create a playlist in iTunes>burn playlist to disc. But you want to break up your lengthy GarageBand track into several tracks on a CD for easy indexing and location by the listener later on with their CD player…you can’t do this when you share your tracks direct to iTunes.

SOLUTION: In the latest version of GarageBand 08, you can use a Podcast track to create markers that will act as tracks when you choose “Burn Song to CD” from the share menu. From the GarageBand help menu: “If a project contains chapter markers and the podcast or movie track is visible when you burn the project to a CD, the chapter markers are used to define the tracks on the CD.” Check out my screencast below: (NOTE: I was not inhaling helium when I created the screencast even though my voice sounds like Alvin…this is a wonky feature of the free screencast-o-matic online software I was using to create this tutorial.)

Related Posts:

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

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

Garageband is a great tool many of you are using to create license free music for your podcasts, slideshare presentations, and videos. Access to hundreds of loops allows easy creation of original soundtracks by literally dragging and dropping a guitar riff, bass line and back beat onto a track.

While the ease of using Garageband loops is appealing, it can also create tracks that are predictable and uninspired to listeners. Even if your aim is to create a transparent background track, careless use of loops can distract your audience or cause them to dismiss your project entirely.

Many of the loops in Garageband are so popular, they are immediately recognizable. With a bit of planing, even familiar loops can be used to create music that sounds original, not “canned”. Here are some tips on using loops in Garageband responsibly:

1) Use basic musical forms such as ABA and Rondo (A,B,A,C,A)
This will give your musical project a basic structure on which to build your ideas. One loop extended in endless repetition gets old quick. Check out Pete Whitfield’s wiki on structure and intensity for some great examples from pop music.

2) Vary a basic loop with a single percussion loop.
Does the phrase Needs more cowbell ring a bell? Adding a shaker or tambourine loop on top of a more substantial loop is like a dash of spice for your musical composition.

3) Change the original tempo of a loop.
The standard tempo for many of the most popular loops in Garageband is 120 bpm. By shifting the tempo at least 10 bpm more or less, you can breathe new life into some of the more redundant loops.

4) Combine loops to create new ideas.
It drives me crazy when I hear a single loop used exclusively for a single track. Maybe it’s because I use Garageband every week with my students and familiarity breeds contempt…
Don’t be lazy. Combine loops to create new ideas. Your fellow listeners will be grateful.

5) Watch your levels between transitions and listen before you post.
This last tip is not necessarily about creativity or structure. Many loops in Garageband have different volume levels. Be sure that the overall volume of all the parts of your project is an acceptable level for the listener. Be careful when you transition between musical vs. spoken sections. Nothing says delete me faster than a poorly mixed project where the volume between spoken and musical sections drastically changes, forcing the listener to madly scramble for their volume control. You’ve worked hard on your presentation; make sure it gets heard in its entirety with audio levels that are consistent throughout.

We all take time to plan our content before posting ideas on-line- take some time to plan the music that will be a part of your projects as well. Music teachers will thank you for the extra effort.

Thanks to Hans Feldmeier and his post at etwinning e-digiskills blog for turning me onto Screencast-O-Matic so I could show you this cool tip in Garageband. The audio makes me sound like I have a lisp, and the video is a little wonky, but it’s a decent on-line screencast tool in a pinch: