garageband – iLearn Technology

Rock Our World: Using music to collaborate and change the world

January 3, 2011Kelly Tenkely7 Comments3242 views

What it is: Rock Our World has one goal, to give students authentic global collaboration opportunities by connecting them with music. Rock Our World has been doing just that since 2004. Students and teachers collaborate in composing original music, making movies, and meeting each other in live video chats. Using GarageBand (Apple), each country creates a 30 second drum beat. Every Friday, the drum created rotates to another country, where the bass guitar is added. It gets passed from country to country with another instrument added at each stop. When it gets back to the original country, it is an original piece of music that has been created with the help of kids around the world.

While the music is being passed from country to country, students have opportunities to meet and discuss various topics of curriculum in live video chats. Incredible companies have been involved in this project including Apple, Fablevision, Discovery, American Film Institute, Smart Technologies, NASA, Visual Learning Company, Lintor Publishing, Mariner Software, actor Will Smith and more. Pretty impressive!

Applications for Rock Our World will be accepted for pre-kindergarten through university in January. You can sign up for membership by providing your email address to be alerted to the exact date you can begin applying.

How to integrate Rock Our World into the classroom: This is an incredible opportunity for your students to work and collaborate with other students around the world. Not only will your students be learning and interacting with new cultures, they will also be learning more about music. Your students will be a part of creating a unique song by adding their piece to it. At the end, each country will have a song touched by students around the world. How cool is that?!

It would be really neat at the end of the project to create an iMovie of the final song that includes the globe animation zooming into each country as their bit of the song is played and including a slideshow of students from each country.

Tips: Take a look at previous projects by clicking on the “Media” tab.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Rock Our World in your classroom.

Aviary Education

June 25, 2010Kelly Tenkely3 Comments4161 views

Great news! Aviary has come out with a special education edition! In the Education version, teachers can create private student accounts, manage assignments and projects, use the image editor, vector editor, audio editor, and music creator. All content and images will be 100% school safe! Right now the Education site is in Beta, you can request an invitation to test the site with your students. If you aren’t familiar with the Aviary tools, check out my previous posts HERE. Aviary is a fabulous online alternative to those expensive Adobe creativity suites.

Bomomo

April 20, 2010April 20, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3558 views

What it is: Sometimes students just need a place to get out some creative energy. Bomomo is the perfect place to send them. Bomomo lets creativity run wild with a new kinds of painting tools. Students imaginations will run with the possibilities that this site offers. There just isn’t any other painting program like it. Try it out for the full effect. Student masterpieces can be saved to the desktop offline, these would make great customized desktop images.

How to integrate Bomomo into the classroom: Allow students to create their own desktop images for classroom computers using Bomomo. Teach your students about abstract artists and art, then let them create their own with Bomomo. Ask older students to describe (in writing) what each tool does, how it works, what happens when they click or move their mouse. Have students compare their finished descriptions finding common language and differences. Students can come up with common definitions for each tool. This is a great exercise in descriptive writing, explanatory writing, and observation. My students asked if they could use Bomomo to create CD covers for the music that they created in GarageBand, of course I said yes! This is a fun site to explore as a class using an interactive whiteboard or projector.

This site is so calming and captivating, I wonder if it would be a good one for students to play with before taking tests?

Tips: There are two ways to save student creations: normal and high quality. Normal saves as a jpg and high quality saves as a png image.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Bomomo in your classroom.