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

**JULY 2008: FOLLOW-UP TO THIS ISSUE: SEE NEW POST HERE: FLIP VIDEO NOW WORKS WITH IMOVIE08

I have some more insight about using The FlipVideo since I wrote my initial post in January.

I should start off by stating the main reason I use this camera is to make videos available to my family and friends via YouTube or other on-line video sharing sites. This was a strong selling point (and marketing push) for The Flip and other digital video cameras. Many of these devices have a simple “one-click” feature for easy upload directly to YouTube, AOL video or MySpace video.

We are also using The FlipVideo to record student assessments (see my post about this) for music and then uploading them to a district sponsored media sharing site.

And while it is very easy to shoot your video, navigate to the DCIM folder, find your .AVI video and upload it to a video sharing site, for those of us using Macs and iMovie08 to quickly edit videos and then upload them to a video sharing site, we have been out of luck. Here is an FAQ about this from The FlipVideo Support Page:

I’m having trouble using Flip Videos with iMovie ’08 on my Macintosh. What’s wrong?

There is a known compatibility issue with Flip Video Camcorder videos and the new version of Apple’s application suite, iLife ’08, which includes iMovie ‘08, iDVD ‘08, etc., and Apple is working to resolve it. With the release of iLife ’08, Apple introduced an improved video engine that unfortunately also caused many video formats to become incompatible with the new version. As Apple works to resolve the issue, in parallel, Pure Digital is working with Apple to better understand the issue and determine if we can expedite a solution from our side.

A DONATIONWARE SOLUTION: iSquint

So the main issue with iMovie’08 is that you cannot import the .AVI files from The FlipVideo camera directly into iMovie’08 to edit. NOTE: If you are using iMovieHD, the previous iLife’06 version of iMovie, you can easily import your .AVI files from The Flip and edit away…And while you can view your FlipVideo .AVI files in Quicktime, saving it as a .MOV file still doesn’t work for importing into iMovie’08.

After asking some friends about this problem and checking out some forums, one solution I discovered was iSquint: an iPod video conversion app for Mac. Here is a screenshot:

All you have to do is drag your .AVI file into the iSquint window, click the “H.264 Encoding” box, click start and your video is converted into a .MP4 format. Then you can open iMovie’08, choose “Import Movies…” and import your newly converted movie for editing in iMovie’08.

BOTTOM LINE: If you like using iMovie’08 for quick and easy editing of your files and the “Share” feature to YouTube, iSquint may be the solution for you. Why do I use iMovie’08? For videos I share with my family and friends on-line, I typically only need to add a title and a couple of transitions and upload it to the web…iMovie’08 works great for this.