Educreations

With this website or app, your students have their own IWB to play with. Have students create a recorder tutorial for next year's class, or they can record themselves and create short tutorials to share with others. Classmates can watch other's recordings and leave comments. It can also be a great teacher tool as well. Create directions for a project on Educreations. Record yourself explaining the project and show the rubric that will be used at the end of the project. Copy the link of your recording and create a link off your webpage for student reference. Educreations is free and web based as well as an app for the iPad.

Warning: The web based program (www.educreations.com) is limited when creating a recording. The app is much easier to use and has more options when recording and taking pictures. However, when setting up a free account it is easier to use the web based program.

We’ve found that it’s helpful to log in and set up the iPads for the students in advance. While it’s not a difficult app to navigate, it can take up class time that would be better spent working.

You can also search Educreations for other music lessons that you can refer students to, or just for inspiration.

Here is an example of Vivaldi's "Winter" as a listening log. Students can press record when you start the music, and this will record their interpretation of the music as they hear it. This could be a guided interpretation with prompts or a free interpretation, as this video is. If you have mirroring capabilities in your classroom, you could use Reflector or Apple TV to project this on the board so students could watch each others' work and share. If you don't have mirroring capabilities, you can have them save this to your account and simply project it from your computer when logged in.

In this example, two students worked independently to compose and play a 3 note song. They also added a tip to playing the recorder as a unit culmination. And, of course, they went above and beyond to give us some spectacular insight as well!

Third grade students learned to use Educreations by using as a lesson guide projected on the wall. As we learned to play a G, we used the "Everything is Awesome" song from the LEGO MOVIE as an A section, and then practiced playing the rhythms of "awesome" things as a B section. This video was made during a 30 min lesson on proper posture, playing their first note G, and reviewing an Orff arrangement of the song we had learned previously. After class, I simply added this video to my website so that students could go home and access it to practice.