The Most Amazing Sound

I'm doing a series of short posts during the holiday break.

I’ve decided my favorite sound in school is that of students talking about what they've learned or what they're learning. 

Sometimes it’s just them retelling something, but it also might be them expressing an opinion or an explanation of something they discovered. For all that is said about assessment and data, there’s something undeniably powerful in just listening to a learner speaking confidently about the lesson material. 

I've heard this recently in "podcast" projects and Socratic Seminars. Here are a couple links.

• How we do "podcast" audio recording projects at our school
• A good post from John Spencer about Socratic Seminars

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.

Examples of The Way of the Artist

Last week I wrote about The Way of the Artist, how we can inspire with art by working through the three "not so simple steps":

• Dream big
• Do the hard work to make it real
• Show off the final result

Here are a few examples of projects I've done in the past that illustrate how it plays out in the classroom. Notice that these projects require the students to work through those three steps, but I as the teacher am doing the same thing as we go through the project. I dream up the end product, work to take the class through it, then write about it on my blogs. Art (and therefore inspiration) is happening at several levels and I try to make sure it impacts as many people as possible.

• Live video announcements - My work in the high school Communications and the Media class is filled with examples of students working to bring a vision into reality.
• Smart Jams Math Music Videos - This was one of my most ambitious projects. We made math music videos with fifth graders in their Music class. It was a great learning experience for all involved.
• Digital Storytelling with WeVideo - I made this creative project to introduce students to WeVideo. It's a good example of giving all students the same starting elements (photos in this case) and they combine them in imaginative ways to make something unique. It eventually grew into this much more popular project...
• Using Comics and Google Tools for Digital Storytelling - There are countless ways to use this tool, but I usually stick pretty closely to the process outlined here. This post links to some updates I've made since that original article was written.
• Reminding Students Dreams Matter - This is another music video project, this time a lot simpler than the Smart Jams one above. I put a lot of work into recording the song, but that's because music doesn't even count as work for me! It's another example where art was happening on several levels, for the students, teachers and my family as we made up the song. We shared it on Facebook to our community and it got a lot of love.

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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 this blog with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.