Rolling Along

The wikispaces website is in full use and the kids are loving it.  I find them logging in over the weekend to have discussions on the discussion board.  They think it is amazing that they can interact with me and with each other outside of the school day.  The students are constantly asking for me to post more clips and questions that they can peruse at home.  We'll see how long the fascination with the website lasts.


Vacation days, assemblies and field trips have consumed large quantities of our class time as of late so the kids have not had much opportunity to work on GarageBand in the past two weeks.  We're going to jump into GarageBand again on Thursday.


The assignment for Thursday is as follows:

• Create a 32-bar song in AABA form. 
• Each section of the song should be eight bars long. 
• Include at least two loops in each section- a percussion loop and a melodic loop. 
• Save to the folder on the StudentShare.  

We are also going to spend a bit of time discussing the elements that contribute to an interesting and cohesive song.  At the moment the kids are mostly picking loops that they think sound cool but the different sections do not sound as if they are at all related to each other.  My hope is that the kids will eventually be able to create a coherent finished piece.

Wikispaces

The GarageBand project has finally started trucking along and it feels like most of the logistical kinks have been worked out.  Now I am focused on trying to make this experience as valuable as possible.

I have created a wikispaces website for our class to promote the sharing of student work and to offer guided practice in providing polite and constructive criticism to peers.

The website is locked and password protected.  I wish I could share it with my faithful blog readers because I think it is going to be a really excellent tool, but the privacy and security of my students is the top priority.

Yesterday was the wikispaces roll out.  But before introducing my students to the website and its uses I first addressed both internet safety and "netiquette."

I was surprised at how seriously my students took the internet safety discussion.  Only about half of them have internet access at home and therefore have limited exposure to the online world in general and social networking in particular.  We discussed the importance of protecting our identities but the element of the conversation that they took most interest in was the idea that nothing posted on the internet is ever totally deleted.  They were very struck by the idea that a poor choice online could negatively impact high school and college applications or future career opportunities.

The conversation was rich and powerful but unfortunately it prevented us from actually exploring the website!  Most of the students managed to figure out how to log in and navigate to the GarageBand page, but we ran out of time to complete the assignment which was to listen to the song posted on the page and to define, on the discussion forum, why the song qualifies as an ABA song.

Even so, the kids left the class very excited about the website.  I cannot wait to meet with them again next week and start working in the discussion forum.

Speed Bumps

Anytime a new curriculum is launched there are unexpected speed bumps that slow down the process.  The GarageBand project has been fraught with them.

All the student laptops are connected to the StudentShare, an off-site server where students can save files and access them at a later date from any other computer on the network.  It also serves as a back-up should the computers crash or get stolen.  It is a fantastic system but it turns out no other teachers are using the StudentShare this school year.  I realized that the laptops were generally underutilized at our school but I did not know this was the case across all of our other schools as well.  Clearing out the virtual cobwebs and setting up the individual student folders took a bit longer than anticipated.

I finally finished setting up all the folders (with the appropriate permissions since it turned out the folders defaulted to "read-only") and prepared the lesson that would introduce the kids to using the StudentShare.  Of course on the day that I schedule to teach the lesson the server goes down.  We used to have frequent server issues but it had not been a problem all year so it was rather funny that it would go down on the one day that I am teaching kids to access it.

Last Thursday everything was finally up and running and I was able to teach the lesson.  The kids created 24-bar ABA songs, using loops, and saved them to their individual folders on the StudentShare.  The lesson itself went smoothly and about 85% of the class successfully saved their files to the correct folder.

SUCCESS!

This weekend my plan was to listen to each of the files to assess the students understanding of ABA form and their comfort-level with the loops aspect of GarageBand.  I have been foiled yet again as it turns out my ancient employee MacBook is still running GarageBand '09 and the student laptops are running GarageBand '11; my computer will not open their files.

Swell.

I have emailed our technology department to find out if I can upgrade my GarageBand.  If upgrading GarageBand on my work computer is not possible my Plan B is to upgrade my old personal Macbook to Snow Leopard, upgrade my GarageBand '08 to '11 and then begin having the kids save the files to a Dropbox folder so that I can access them from my personal computer.

Needless to say, this has been a frustrating week in GarageBand land.

But I think the biggest frustration of all has been realizing that we have all of this technology at our disposal and it is not being put to good use in our classrooms.  We are currently missing major opportunities to increase the relevance of our students' learning experiences.

UPDATE:
Big props to our IT department for checking email on a Sunday afternoon.  I received a response 30 minutes after making this post.  They will update my computer with iLife '11 if I am willing to drop my computer off at our network office for a day.