I recently chatted to my colleague, Steve Hawke, our music coordinator who has been inspiring me with his work with our iPads. He has been using an app called Figure to teach his Year 4 children aspects of music covered in Switched on ICT along with other aspects of the Music curriculum.
The app he mentions is Figure, which is available on the app store and is very popular with our Key Stage 2 pupils.
I love Puppet Pals and have enjoyed using it to bring play scripts alive this year. By chance the boys and I discovered Bible Buddies, which is made by the same people who brought us Puppet Pals. Bible Buddies is basically Puppet Pals but with Biblical Characters, though it should be said most of these are in-app purchases. Here is Leo and Charlie’s versions of Jonah and the Whale made with the app.
If you have seen digital music in action on Garageband on iPad but you don’t have iPads, then Jam with Chrome maybe a viable alternative. You have a broad range of instruments, collaboration with others, autoplay and funky effects all via Chrome. Another reason to ensure your school machines has Chrome installed as well as Internet Explorer.
Whitecap – Visuals for your Disco
Last Saturday, I helped a friend out by resurrecting my old DJ skills and DJ equipment. Though things have moved on since my hey day behind the decks. You can see in the picture what my set up used to look like, last week the CD players were replaced by 2 iPads, Spotify playlists and a laptop running Youtube. I had a projector to show video clips, but when these were not running we used Whitecap. I had not seen this Windows download before and I was really pleased with how well it worked. Essentially Whitecap produces visuals in response to music it detects via your computer microphone. Think the fractals you get from Windows Media Player visualizations, but with more control by you.
Hackasaurus Video from Ian Addison
I love Hackasaurus and the more I use it with classes the more risks they and I take with it. If you have not seen it before then take a look at Ian’s video which gives you an idea of how to use it. Hackasaurus works as both an insight into html and an uber writing frame, which is how I have been using it, presenting children with a BBC News web page and asking them to change the news to fit in with a local or topic based story.
Anyway here is one of Ian’s under ten minutes videos which make tools like this more accessible.
Makeuseof.com have created another one of their fantastic free help guide/manual thingys. This time they have created a guide about the Raspberry Pi. Aside from this guide you can find a range of other helpful guide on their site including Google Analytics, Gmail and Evernote.
I don’t tend to buy books in their physical form any more Since getting my Kindle I have switched to downloading and space-saving. But, occasionally something comes along that is so interesting and fresh, but so not available on Kindle that you need to buy the actual book.
I haven’t read the book cove to cover, instead I skimmed through the collection of what I think are very new ideas for teaching music in a digital context. I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about free tools and great edu apps, but apart from YouTube and Garage Band
the apps and tools in this book are all new to me.
It feels like this book is aimed at secondary music teachers, but for me a non specialist primary dabbler it still worked. James’s ideas are fleshed out in just enough readable detail so that you could repeat or refashion them into your lesson . An essential text for teachers who want their music to be all a bit digital.
I love music apps that actually sound like current music rather than a 90s advert soundtrack. Charlie and I downloaded Launchpad last week and we have both found it very difficult to put this rather addictive app down. This was Charlie playing with the app for the first time last week, sounding a bit Paul Van Dyk.
This along withFigure and Garage Band would be another great app to use in Year 4 to cover the Switched On ICT unit – We Are Musicians.
Now here is the official app Youtube Clip, though I think Charlie is more engaging to watch:
The makers of Daisy the Dinosaur,one of the few programming apps for primary children, are working on a new app. I took a look at a preview this week and I like what I see. More to come on this… but here are a couple of screenshots
A fantastic utility for working with sound on your iPad – record 30 seconds of audio, publish it and get a url to use on your site or blog. Imagine the possibilities for using this in school. You could have a wall of pictures of hopes for the future for example – each one a picture drawn by pupils, each picture could be hyper linked to the sound files hosted on croak.it. I am sure there are more ideas and lots of SEN uses too. It is free too!
Surely everyone has seen this video now, but I just think it has huge potential as a writing stimulus. I am also still pinching myself that we are going to see this kind of technology on our lifetime.
The Infinite Thinking Machine is a great 5 minutes of fast paced US education focussed technology news and stuff.
Here is their latest episode, I particularly like their report on what teachers could learn from Youtube. While their list of tools to introduce programming include some tools even I’d not heard come across before.
We took a little deviation from Scratch and the like in yesterday’s Code Club. We looked instead at Edcanvas.com and thought about how we could use this to build projects and as an organiser for online our research. I have mentioned Edcanvas on this blog before, it is essentially a tool to create and share online presentations. It is a browser-based web app and can be used across all devices, which makes it super mobile. The presentations can be made up of text, Flickr images, web clips , embedded Youtube videos and any items from your desktop/dropbox or google drive. The finished product is a sort of hybrid of a website and presentation or as the site describes itself:
The one place to organize, present and share knowledge
When I started using Edcanvas I saw it as a tool to create versatile presentations, which I could share with my class using a simple url link and viewed on our iPads. Since then the tool has continued to evolve and today members of code club were able to create their own canvases. It is now open to pupils as well as teachers!.
Code Club members and my year 6 class now have access to a new and flexible tool for organising and presenting research work, both at home and at school. As a teacher I can view all of my classes canvases and enrol my pupils as users via a simple and memorable code, rather than getting them to sign up with an email, this makes the service both easy to use and safe. A further feature development to mention is the ability to embed the canvases in websites and blogs. This is great news for my class who are creating World War 2 themed sites using Weebly to build websites from the ground up. They will (I hope) be able to embed a canvas/presentation within a page of their site.
Here is an example of one Edcanvas created by one of my girls, it shows the beginnings of a canvas around the theme of Roald Dahl.
Back to yesterday, and our club just had a 20 minute play with the tool and so it was all a bit artificial and unusual as the children devised their own ares of interest to build canvases on, rather than a specific class topic. It was amazing though to see how in just a few minutes everyone had at least 6 slides of either text , images or embedded items.
Following their initial play with the tool, the group were privileged and excited to find themselves having a Skype conversation with Amy – one of the developers of Edcanvas. They passed on their thoughts about usage and feature requests while Amy listened attentively.
Aside from Edcanvas, it was also great to hear Amy’s advice for my young programmers, which to paraphrase went something like this:
You have the ability to easily create something amazing and have it online . Don’t lose that !
Big thanks to Amy for being a responsive and attentive developer and taking on board the suggestions of teachers like myself. Edcanvas is shaping up to being a very powerful tool.
I came across Pie Corbett’s book on teaching non-fiction genres in the last couple of weeks and I have found it an energizing read. For many of us, last year’s literacy plans can get a bit stale and something fresh is often more welcome. Well I have found a fresh approach and the foundations of good plans here in Pie Corbett‘s book.
The Talk for Writing approach is essentially good Literacy teaching,in that the class are initially immersed in a high quality text, they analyse features and components and then finally innovate on this through writing their own. Along the way there is a good deal of quality talk through debates and starter activities which further immerse the children in the language they need. Not to mention mapping the text graphically in order for children to really get to grips with the routes they need to walk when writing in an unfamiliar genre.
Our focus was discussion texts and I was thrilled to read that the context in the book was Doctor Who. The two big questions highlighted were whether the Daleks should be allowed to stay on earth, followed by a discussion around whether the Doctor should give up his life and settle on earth.
