Reason Project

Another software that I have had the opportunity to explore through the Intermediate/Advanced Applications New Technologies Course at Teachers College, Columbia University is Reason.  Reason is a virtual recording studio rack.

I experimented with different features of the software and uploaded my creation to SoundCloud.

Laying Down Vocals

We are FINALLY moving in to the final stages of the AABA project.

A handful of students have finished their accompaniment tracks and are beginning to lay down live tracks.  They had the options of using voices or their band instruments for the live tracks but so far all have elected to do vocal tracks.

The kids are recording the tracks using my Yeti microphone.  I am a big proponent of using a quality external mic for this project rather recording using the Macbook internal microphone.  The Yeti produces a near-professional quality recording and the kids deserve for their hard work to sound as polished as possible.  A couple of them have mentioned that they were very impressed that I "know how to do this kinda stuff."  After they lay down their vocals I introduce them to the GarageBand vocal effects features and allow them to play around with adding effects to their vocal tracks.

After all of the kids have completed the project I am going to upload the final products to the class wikispace website so that they can listen to their classmates' work and discuss it on the discussion boards. I am also planning to burn a class album of all of their final projects to give to them as an end-of-year gift.

I am hoping to wrap up the entire GarageBand unit in the next three weeks.  After that we need to shift into full-time band rehearsals to prepare for the band concert.  A lot of rehearsal and lesson time has been sacrificed due to the state tests and we're going to need to do a big final push to have the music polished and performance-ready in time for the concert.

Slow Progress

Slow progress has been made and a few of my students should be ready to record their live tracks next week.

I am still not seeing my class with any consistency.  In fact I haven't seen them at all this week.  This week I've been given a hodge podge of fourth graders some of whom are in my elective and some whom are not.  The students in my elective that have come to me this week have been sent off to continue working independently on their GarageBand projects.  I've been doing Intro to GarageBand for the rest of the students who are not usually in my music class.

The state test begins next week, so I am hopeful that we will return to our regular schedule as of Tuesday.  This will leave us with about 12 more class periods to wrap up the GarageBand project.

I'm disappointed that we won't get to the iMovie/film scoring lessons I had planned.  I think my students would have been really excited to dabble in another aspect of composition.

A Gaga Remix

In addition to teaching full-time I am completing my Masters of Arts in music and music education at Teachers College, Columbia University.  As part of my degree I am enrolled in an applied music technology course.  In the course we have been using the program Ableton Live.  Assignment requirements include:
• At least one imported audio file.
• At least two minutes in length.
• At least one effects processor.
• At least one track of recorded audio.
• At least one track of MIDI.


I have uploaded my completed project on SoundCloud.  Take a listen!

Testing Season

We have entered every teachers favorite time of year: standardized testing season.

I apologize for the recent radio silence on the blog but unfortunately there has been very little to report.  While No Child Left Behind certainly increased the weight given to standardized testing for all schools, as a charter school in New York City the state tests carry even greater importance.  Our continued existence is largely based upon the scores our students earn on these tests.

Due to the importance of these tests a lot of time in the weeks leading up to testing is spent preparing our students to perform at the highest possible level.  As an unfortunate result content not related to ELA (English Language Arts) or Math is relegated to the back burner.

I have barely seen my fourth grade students these past few weeks.  They are only able to attend music sporadically, and when they do attend large numbers of students are pulled out to receive additional tutoring.  Because of this we have made very little progress on the GarageBand project.  Most students are still working on their AABA arrangements.  A few students have moved beyond and are beginning to write lyrics (and in some cases melodies) to eventually be recorded into the tracks.

The actual state test does not occur until the end of April so I am anticipating several more weeks of irregular class periods.  I will likely need to reevaluate my expectations for final projects as we are not going to be able to cover nearly as much material as I had first hoped.

AABA

Posted below is an example of an assignment completed by a student in my class yesterday.

The guidelines included:

• 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.  

 Click here to listen to a student created AABA example

The song was posted to the class wikispace page and students are asked to answer the following questions on the discussion board:

• How is the A section similar to the B section?
• How is the A section different from the B section?
• What elements of this song cause it to sound like one cohesive work?

We will continue building on this foundation by writing song lyrics or related melodic lines to be recorded and added to the track.

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.

GarageBand - Day 1

Yesterday my 4th graders launched the GarageBand unit.

Immediately upon entering the classroom and seeing the laptop cart a hand shot in the air,

"Are we going to learn GarageBand!?!"

Last year I covered a technology period for a teacher that went home sick.  I was provided 10 minutes notice and carte blanche.  The first idea that popped into my head was GarageBand and I ran with it.  This particular child was in that class on that day.

I anticipated spending most of the period rehearsing procedure and routine but the kids nailed the initial set-up routine perfectly the first time.  Since they use the computers during their weekly technology sessions in their homerooms they were fluent in setting up and logging in to the computers.  I used my SmartBoard to demonstrate how to locate GarageBand in the finder and start a new file.

The remaining 15 minutes of the lesson were devoted to exploring loops.  The students were tasked with selecting one percussion loop, dragging it to the work area and looping it for 16 bars.  If they completed that assignment they were free to layer additional loops underneath.  The primary objective was to get them familiar with working in the interface.

I was amazed that in a short 15 minute period so many of the students had already put together really catchy beats and grooves.  Some of them are already well on their way to creating a full-blown song.

The laptops will come back out on Thursday.  Objectives include:

• Students will create a 32-bar piece using loops in AB form.
• Students will save the file created to their folder on the shared server.

The Great Fourth Grade Experiment

As the founding music teacher at a prominent charter school in Harlem, NYC I have had the great fortune of creating at least one new curriculum from scratch every school year.  Consequently my fourth grade students, whom opened the school as first graders, have become the musical guinea pigs.

At the beginning of this school year the teachers of the "special" subjects proposed a program to our principal in which the fourth graders select one elective special to study intensively throughout the school year.  24 students elected music and meet with me last period every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  Two periods a week are dedicated to beginning band but the remaining two periods a week are dedicated to my ever evolving general music curriculum.

The first half of the school year has been focused on music literacy with students primarily studying the ukulele.  Both the students and myself are growing tired of the ukes and are ready to jump into a new unit.  Therefore today I launch a unit that has been stewing deep down for over a year.

Today we dive into...

(Drum Roll Please)

GarageBand!

The school does not have a computer lab, instead we use a rolling MacBook cart that travels from classroom to classroom.  The initial week or two of the curriculum will be devoted to teaching the routines and procedures of set-up and pack-up of the laptops.  A rough sketch of the remaining unit is as follows:
-Early to Mid-February: Introduction of loops.  Students experiment with creating beats and grooves.
-Late-February to Mid-March: Composition.  Students begin using their beats and grooves created with loops to create original compositions.  Live tracks of either voices or their band instruments are layered in to create brief compositions.
-Late-March to Late-April: If students aren't totally bored at this point I hope to bring in iMovie and introduce the students to basic film scoring.

I plan to document every rocky step, so stay tuned for the next installment of The Great Fourth Grade Experiment!