4 articles Tag Course 3

Original Compositions By The ‘Remix Generation’

by on March 12, 2012, 0 comments

In most situations in life, I think it’s always important to know and understand the rules before you go ahead and break them. This is especially important in music. Before you can make that cutting edge track, you must first know why the basics work and have been so popular. So in one of my Grade 4 class, my students listened to, studied and deconstructed the song, ‘Hella Good’ by No Doubt. An amazingly effective song (try not nodding your head when you listen to it), but so simple in it’s structure and composition in the same vein as ‘Billy Jean‘.

 

After we listened to the song, how it starts, the basic layers of the song, etc. We noticed a simple pattern. The students had already seen this pattern happen over and over again in new song and songs of the past. So we set out to create our own track, based on these simple but effective practices.

The students opened Garageband and laid down a kick drum track. Some went for a simple 4/4 beat while some went for a little bit more of a Hip Hop style. After this, they added their snare track. Then some cymbals. Then some type of percussion ‘flair’ like a hand clap, rim shot, a big crash, etc. This was hard for the students, as they wanted to add EVERYTHING to every track they made. As a result, the songs sounded very cluttered and over the top. So we came back to our example, ‘Hella Good’ and had another listen. The space between the percussion is what really makes this song so effective, so they went back and recomposed their percussion.

After they had a solid percussion arrangement, they went ahead and added some melody. This is where I crashed and burned as a teacher. I have absolutely no musical experience or background, so I could not teach them to play a melody. But almost all of the students play an instrument and can read music so they managed to lay down some interesting melodies with synths or pianos or horn sections.

I then showed them how to add voice recordings and how to manipulate them. They had a field day with this, singing and speaking into the computer mic, manipulating it to sound distorted, high pitched, low pitched, etc. They had a lot of fun!

After this they were just about finished. Except their song didn’t last very long and were very repetitive. We had another listen to ‘Hella Good’ to see how they added an intro and outro to their track. They noticed No Doubt slowly built up the song so that it didn’t start straight into the chorus. So they worked on structuring their songs to make them more interesting, to build up and down.

When they had finished, they surprised me and I think they even surprised themselves at how great their songs were. They created their own original composition, without the use of loops or copying other peoples music or ideas. I am extremely proud of them and their work. It just goes to show, the ‘remix generation’ can actually develop their own original work too. If Grade 4 students can do it, anyone can.

The Relationship Between Piracy and Sales

by on March 8, 2012, 0 comments

I just started a unit with my G5 classes on Copyright and Creative Commons. We always have vigorous discussion on the issue and it’s interesting to hear my students point of view. As there are a lot of numbers that get thrown around when talking about Copyright, Copyright infringement and piracy, I thought it would be a good idea to find an infographic for us to discuss as a class. I stumbled across this inforgraphic title, “The Sky Is Rising” by Tech Dirt (if it’s too small, click it to enlarge).

It’s very interesting to see that despite the entertainment industry really showing their disdain for piracy (see SOPA et al.), and claiming such large losses as a result, they aren’t doing too bad with digital sales. And as Peter Nowak seems to suggest, piracy and legal sales seem to have a very interesting relationship. In his article “The counterintuitive truth about piracy and profits“, Nowak lists the most pirated movies of all time.

 

“Leading the list (of most pirated films) were Avatar, The Dark Knight and Transformers, all of which were mega-hits in theatres.”

 

It’s interesting to hear that some of the most pirated movies also did very well at the box office and on DVD sales. Now I’m all for Copyright and giving the original artist the credit and the money they deserve, but with figures like these, does piracy really have the negative impact we are made to believe? Are movies suffering at the box office and in DVD sales, or are popular movies at cinemas equally as popular as illegal downloads? I’ll be very interest in seeing what conclusions my students draw from these statistics, I have a feeling it works in favor of a lot of their arguments already.

Teaching Design Through Presentations

by on February 17, 2012, 0 comments

As an ICT teacher, I feel I am responsible for teaching the middle school students a lot of what they need to know about presentations. When it comes to presentations, I find that their technology skills are fine and they are easily able to use Powerpoint or Keynote to make a presentation. The problem I see with their slideshows is that they have a lot to learn design wise. With effective design comes effective communication.

To help my students develop effective presentations, I like to educate my students on some simple principals of good design. I use a range of resources for this, but the one I like most is Jesse Desjardins’s (the Social Media Manager for Tourism Australia) presentations on Slideshare that outlines the bad elements of design and gives great tips on how to improve it. The following slideshow is my favourite as it not only tells us what not to do and how to improve design, but it also sets a great example in itself.

 

STEAL THIS PRESENTATION!
View more presentations from @JESSEDEE


Another issue I see arising is that students regularly complain that their content lets them down and that it’s hard to make a boring topic interesting. To that argument, I like to turn to The Oatmeal, who is known for making some very funny comics on the internet. He is most passionate about punctuation and has made a range of comics on how to use specific punctuation conventions in a fun and engaging way. My favourite is the semicolon tutorial which he developed. This would be perfect for a middle school English class. To view the comic click the image below.

I also try to use good elements of design in all of my presentations. It takes a long time, but I think it’s important to show the students good examples. You can see my examples on my Slideshare page. The slideshow I am most proud of is my passwords lesson, I think it’s visually engaging and incorporates a lot of good elements of design. Plus now I’ve spent the time to make a great presentation, I can use it over and over again each year.

How do you teach good design in your classes? Do you always set a good example? Do you give the students any specific, real world examples? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Mac OSX Keyboard Shortcuts Poster

by on February 3, 2012, 0 comments

My students have transitioned from using a desktop PC to using Mac laptops so I thought I would make them a poster displaying most of the common keyboard shortcuts. Hopefully this is going to save them some time and make them more efficient when using computer. Feel free to use it in your classroom, office, staffroom, etc. Images of the poster can be found here on Flickr.

 

 
I designed the poster with simplicity in mind. I wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing but easy to read from a long distance as not all computers could be proximal to the posters. I figured that the font size was the smallest I could use to meet the intended purpose of the posters. This also meant that I had to withhold some shortcuts as all of the shortcuts I wanted to add would not fit.