Simple Music Video Projects

I'm highlighting a couple ways to create music video projects at conferences next week. I love these types of projects. They are a good example of how tech can let us "create like never before". I've seen them excite many students. They can be very time consuming, though! (I spent much of my Christmas break editing videos with this method for 5th graders.)

Taking the whole class through a music video project is going to be difficult, but it's good to know some basic tools and options.  That way you can recommend them to interested students who might prefer them as a presentation method.

In contrast to the very involved process above, here are some relatively simple techniques you can refer students to.

First, this is an example a teacher sent me of two students doing a rap that they worked on with the teacher. This was an early draft and it kind of falls apart after the first 30 seconds. You'll get the idea of how easy it can be though. There's no editing, just some background music for rhythm and their performance.


Using those simple lyrics, I had my two kids make pictures on paper. Using the "paper slide" model for videos, here's what I came up with. (Editing is not required on these, but I did take the audio from the above performance and combine it with the video using Corel VideoStudio editing software. You might choose to just play the music loudly in the background as you reveal each picture.)



And here's a final example using that same background track. This time I created the slides in Google Slides and combined them using WeVideo. It's a technique I usually use for narrated slideshows.

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I'm doing a challenge this month to post on one of my blogs every day. It's in preparation for my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from Teaching Like an Artist with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Dreams Matter

I was reminded this past school year how dreams matter. I love to tell students that because they don't hear it enough. When I say it, they listen and it's like watering a garden. Life starts cropping up.

I try to be realistic when I talk about dreams. They don't all come true exactly like we envisioned they would be. Part of the beauty of it is how that initial dream takes shape over time.

When I was young I wanted to make movies. In my late teens I started wanting to have a band. I dreamed of writing songs and recording. I envisioned doing both on a huge scale, being famous for it.

Instead I ended up as a tech coordinator in a small, rural school district. But all those years of playing around with instruments, songs and videos have paid off. I had a great time this year helping teachers and students in Music and Communications. The Music class was at our lower elementary and Communications was at the high school.

I loved how seriously everyone took their job and no one ever asked me how it would affect their grade.

What I've learned is the dream isn't about me. As a teen, I didn't consider that. Now I see the dream was planted then, but ultimately it was meant to inspire the people I'd meet over two decades later.

When I started working with the elementary students I got an idea for a project about dreams. I asked my daughter, age 16, to write a short chorus about following dreams. She wants to be a songwriter.

After she wrote some lyrics, I fleshed it out and taught it to the students.

They loved it. I had them draw some pictures of their dreams and we made this music video.