Orchestra Assignments + Animoto

At my school I am very lucky to have a Head of Department who values the emerging use of technology integrated into the music classroom.  Our classrooms are setup that there are rooms dedicated to certain aspects of music education.  There is a keyboard lab, a rehearsal auditorium and our computer lab with an interactive Promethean whiteboard.

Term 2 began unit for year 7 on Tone Colour and for the first few weeks they focus on all the different instruments of the orchestra, their sounds, position in ensembles and how they produce sound.  At the end of the unit, the students use our computer lab to construct a keynote presentation, with some key slides of information, to solidify all they have learned.  It is an excellent way to gauge who has listened and understood the terms’ content: an assessable assessment if you will.

My problem was three-fold.  We had an excellent bank of computers but students needed inspiration on what they could do with Keynote to show their learning.  Secondly, this was Music! There had to be some way of including sound, or visual components into their assignments.  Then thirdly, how great & comprehensive did I want these assignments to be?  If students could only access their work at school, this put a limit on their creative output.  Maybe I could consider an online option for any user to create their assignment at school or at home?  The answer…

1. Students were given an example of an online presentation I made in Wix.com + links to visit various Orchestra sites on the internet.  I then demonstrated how to embed audio & video into both Wix and Keynote.  Students then got to choose which path they wanted to take to complete the project.

• Wix.com: Make a Website in two minutes
• Wix.com: How to with the Wix Editor
• Wix.com: How to Publish the project

2. Those who decided to use Keynote were provided with some websites that allowed MP3 downloads of orchestral sound-clips to embed into each slide (they also had to bring a thumb-drive to each lesson)

3. I monitored each assignment’s progress from lesson to lesson, demonstrating key skills from the IWB and had the students email me their Wix addresses so I could comment on them via email.

The Task went as followed:

1. Make 8 blank slides or pages in your chosen platform (Keynote or Wix) with these titles:
• Title Page
• Orchestra Seating Chart
• The Four Families of the Orchestra
• Strings
• Woodwind
• Brass
• Percussion
• Bibliography
2. The information for each slide was to be gathered from their given list of websites and texts used that term in class
3. The presentation should demonstrate some integrated sound or visual elements

This video is a collection of some excellent Wix Sites created by my students.  It details what I demonstrated from the IWB and how my students watched my demonstrations and excelled beyond them!

The final result has taken some time to collate but the video below is a presentation I made of my year 7’s efforts in an excellent online tool called Animoto!  This allowed me to take a series of screenshots & videos from each students project, add a track of audio, and Animoto puts it all together into a very clever video presentation with animations etc.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.