Last week’s survey looked at how teachers manage catalogues of recordings in the spirit of Robin Hammerton’s TES blog. With the coursework season upon us, I wasn’t surprised to find that this survey had a relatively small response rate; ten teachers kindly found the time to respond. Thank you to everyone who contributed at the busiest and most stressful time of year for secondary music teachers.
There was one response from a primary teacher who makes use of GarageBand to record pupils’ work. The catalogue is kept using folders and focuses on group recordings rather than tracking an individual’s progress. I liked that pupils get to use iPads to record and share with the teacher and, particularly, that these recordings are occasionally shared on a school wiki.
One secondary respondent mentioned that (s)he uses iDoceo, which has been a popular gradebook app for teachers of many subjects. I wasn’t aware that this app uses the tablet’s local storage and I completely understand how this can be a limiting factor for catalogues of recordings. I wonder if Steve Jackman’s blog about Showbie could be part of a solution? Alternatively, perhaps Jason Greenwell’s use of Google Classroom could meet the same need?
I wasn’t surprised to see mention of video recordings, which can make it easier to identify an individual’s contribution in an ensemble performance. The annual archiving of work to Blu-ray makes sense from a storage space perspective. I remember combating this particular bottleneck by using the ‘private’ setting on YouTube – unlimited video storage and the account was only accessible by key members of staff. Of course, you should speak to your SLT before uploading footage of pupils to the internet.
Rob Shillitoe revealed his identity to tell us about his use of Apple’s Pages to embed video recordings alongside written feedback. A very creative use of the advanced features of this word processing app, which should give us food for thought. He shared a screenshot as an example (click the image for a larger version):
I was really taken with the way Simon Balle’s music department uses audioBoom. Not least because of their respondent’s description: “Much like NUMU but better. Much better and it works.” Have a look at their channel here.
You can see the full set of responses here and I’ve created a Wordle of the fifteen most used words below.
