Disclaimer: I was invited to go to “ Teaching Music with iPads” by Chris Williams (aka @modblog) who is an education consultant, free of charge.
If I were to produce a wordle based on Thursdays training “Teaching Music with Ipads” it would be crammed with words like pulse, rhythm, texture, volume, harmony. Music was at the heart of the day. The iPad was simply a powerful tool to make and analyse music. I think that this is a real strength of Ben Seller’s training. It is not about what we can do for the iPad but what the iPad can do for us as music teachers.
During the day we
- Wrote a song using garageband
- Created a soundtrack for a film using Loopseque
- Exploring looping apps and madpad
- Performed an iPad ensemble.
Ben is a great teacher. The teachers in the room ranged from complete iPad novices to apple fanboys yet he was able to differentiate and support us all.
Although I use garageband and loopseque I was amazed at how much more I could do with it. I realised I had just been scrambling around on the surface of the iceberg that was peaking through the water!
The handouts were excellent – lots of screen shots clearly labelled. I would really recommend this training for any teacher who has access to a school iPad. Chris provided ideas and suggestions if you have only 1 ipad to 30 kids as well as the 1;1 model that some schools are lucky enough to have.
Click here to find out more about this training
Ben is selling a hefty manual “Teaching Music with GarageBand for iPad” which again I would recommend. It provides step by step instructions on how to teach lots of different music projects. The lessons are well structured and the tips for teachers superb. It costs £30 but is well worth it. I am going to ask my music hub and my schools to buy a couple. Click here to find out more
I would love to see hubs working with people like Ben. We know that schools are investing heavily in iPads. This could be a golden opportunity for hubs to get their foot in the door.
I’d also like to see Sing Up encouraging schools to use their iPads to create their own backing tracks or to compose harmonies. It would be fantastic if Sing up could maybe have a webinar with Ben showing how children could take a sing up song as a starting point for some musical creativity.
I’ve come away from the day determined to raise my game. The potential that iPads have is enormous and I have just been paddling in the shallows! My first change is instead of using recorded tracks for my year 6 hip hop project we are going to make our own backing tracks to practise our rapping.
Musical Futures are going to be hosting a twitter chat on music technology using the hashtag #mufuchat on wed 19th Nov at 8.30pm. I intend to post soon so I can outline some of my questions that I would like addressed. Ben Sellers tweets as @bosmanruling and should be contributing
Primary Music Matters 
Hi, I just found your blog through Twitter. It never ceases to amaze me how school has changed so much since the time I was there (many, many years ago). I don't think we would have ever been rapping at school, or using anything more technologically advanced that a large keyboard! It is really awesome how much there is for kids to explore nowadays, although I will never take away from how much I enjoyed music as a child and teenager, with traditional instruments like my guitar. Hope you get the equipment you're after to work with! (o:
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