Our music crew of 6 students, including our SET BC student,  have been working daily with creating tracks and sharing their music with the class. The students are exploring different instruments and how to combine sounds and rhythms to create multi – track recordings. These tracks will be used as the ‘bed’ or background and transitions between the interviews on the podcast. Students are very excited about writing music and are looking forward to hearing their original songs on the podcast. Here is a short audio of one student’s original music and a picture of the track and Garage Band screens.

Jogas backup

Garage Band has been an easy app for students to learn. It offers very good visual contrast and large icons for selecting instruments. This app has been perfect for our SET BC student, who is a primarily a tactile learner with some residual vision. To our surprise, she has been able to use her vision to create music in Garage Band rather than using the voice over, which was proving difficult to master. By navigating from the edge of the screen, she is able to locate the command buttons and then select intruments with good contrast, such as the piano (black and white) and the guitar. Here is a short video of her demonstrating a song on the piano. The class learned this song on the recorder. She memorized the notes and then transferred this to playing piano and guitar on the ipad independently! Here is a short video of her working on Garage Band.

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Uploading the music was a challenge! We finally figured out how to get the song off the ipad and into the iTunes account and then onto our computer! This is good practice for when we compile and edit the interviews and music for the podcast.

Linda

We have been busy this past week working on parent interviews. Students have completed the writing process and are interviewing their parents. Students who are interviewing at school are using audio record on Garage Band. Some parents are not able to come to the school for the interview so their children are scribing the answers and then will read parts, using Garage Band, as a narration on the podcast. Parents have brought interesting and diverse artifacts and have really put a lot of thought into their selection. I’ve included a photo of one of the artifacts.

In class,all the students have been working on various aspects of the project; one group writing music for the transitions, one group photographing, one group contributing student persectives for the blogs, one group learning how to do the narration and one group helping with editing the podcast. Here is a photo of our class organization chart for the project.

As parents come to the school for their interviews, there is a sense of excitement in the class and pride in each student as their parent shares stories from their past. Staff have been talking about how rewarding this project has been in terms of building our community. We have been learning so much about the cultures and experiences of the parents in the class.

As mentioned in my last blog, our students are writing, writing and writing on the iPads using Typ – O! The word prediction has been so helpful for the reluctant writers. One of the photos shows the amount of written work that is being accomplished in a short time.

Our SET BC student is becoming more profecient with keyboarding; we’re practicing everyday on a laptop. There are so many factors to attend to when using voice over on the iPad that being able to touch type is a bonus. She loves using Garage Band and has memorized the location of the icons that she needs to use. She will be joining the music group for the project.

Linda

After numerous interuptions, our project is back on track! We are in the process of organizing the parent interviews. Students are bringing in artifacts and working with the iPads for writing.  

All the students have had an opportunity to write on the iPad using Typ-o, which is an app with word prediction. Although this was their first experience with word predication, they all loved it and found it very easy to edit their work. Our most reluctant writers were so motivated that they wrote more than with paper and pencil and were asking to use the iPad for all their writing.

Our SET BC student has been using the external keyboard and voice over withTyp-O. This is going to take more practice. She has been keyboarding since September and is very accurate when using a talking typing program. However, when she has to write, she uses a few fingers to search for the braille labels on the keys. So, the process is very slow. One strategy we are trying is to have her compose and braille the passage first and then dictate it to her so she can focus on inputting and editing. Currently, there are too many factors to remember: location of keys, paying attention to the voice, the specific iPad commands and the process of composition. She is; however, very motivated! This is an excellent opportunity to help her establish the skills she will need to become a very competent user of technology.

Linda

In the past 2 weeks, I have been working with my SET BC student on learning to use Voice Over. The student really enjoyed the ‘practice’ page, which gives voice prompts for the commands. The touch screen is slightly different in Voice Over; single tap selects, double tap opens and three fingers are required to scroll. We joked about how smart the iPad is – it knows if you aren’t using three fingers to scroll! It doesn’t respond!

The commands worked well in Garage Band; however, the student was frustrated with the drag and drop movements, which require a double tap, hold and drag. It didn’t seem like a natural movement since we usually double tap and release. This will take more practice.

The student also found the selected voice “annoying”; however, this was not a reference to the actual voice but to the constant speaking each instruction over and over. I’m not sure if we can do the selected action before the voice is finished but will try it this week. Since this is a first introduction of adapted voice technology for this student, it’s understandable to be somewhat impatient with having to be constantly listening to the same information over and over.  

We briefly explored Typ-O HD but didn’t input any of our interview questions.  Next week we will introduce the keyboard for the iPad.   

Interviewing is a big part of our project so Nick interviewed his Dad in front of the class. To prepare for the interview, the students wrote “thick and thin” questions in their language arts period. The interview started with NIck asking his Dad about his past. We learned about many of his jobs, including working as a shoeshine boy on Hastings when he was 12, working as a signal man in a logging camp at 14 and travelling the world on cargo ships from 15 to 25 years old. His stops included Japan, N.Z. U. K and Africa. During the interview, we used the Smart Board to show pictures of a shoeshine stand from the 1940′s, Vancouver streets in the 1930′s, ships he worked on and his route on the world map. He shared his artifacts, a Rolex watch purchased in Cape Town in 1952 and a painting of the first ship he sailed on. He retold personal experiences that illustrated how the world has changed. His observations about apartheid in South Africa stimulated discussion and connections to the class’ recent study of the underground railway and the treatment of Chinese railyway workers in Canada.

Partway through the interview, students went back to their tables and wrote four more thick and thin questions based on the presentation. We gathered on the carpet after about 10 minutes and the students asked their questions. The interview lasted about an hour and the students were completely engaged throughout! They wrote thank you letters the following day, which included more questions and their favourite parts of the stories.

It also gave us a chance to try out the software on the iPad in an interview situation. We found that the recording was limited to about 10 minutes and then we had to start a new file. We assume there is a setting for continuous recording which we will explore. We used the  iPad to take some pictures of Nick’s Dad’s articfacts to incorporate into our artifact photo album.

It’s been almost 3 weeks now that the students were introduced to the iPads and how they relate to their learning in Social Studies. As expected, there was a lot of excitment in the class when the “big reveal” happened! The students understand that the iPads are one part of a much bigger project. They have been exploring the features of Garage Band and becoming familiar with how to record and edit in preparation for the interviews. The students have also been learning how to write and record music in Garage Band for the transitions and themes for the podcast.

Tomorrow we will be moving on to the interview stages of the project. Nick’s father will be visiting the class. He will be bringing an artifact that is meaningful to his family history. Nick will be interviewing and recording this session, which will be an example for the students. His focus will be to ask his Dad specific and open ended questions. The students will then be given a chance to ask both types of questions to Nick’s Dad.    

The raw footage will be on the iPad and Nick will demonstrate how to edit the material for the podcast. The students will then decide on a family member to interview and start writing their questions.

We have been very encouraged by the students’ response to this project. They have embraced the concept of learning about their personal history and those of their classmates. They have had ‘no fear’ in using technology and seem to naturally know how to explore the iPads and Garage Band. Our SET BC student, who uses accessibility features, such as voice over to access computers, was able to navigate the home screen and create her own music on Garage Band.

Linda, Nick and Randi

Well, we’ve kept these iPads a secret for a long time now, but today is the the big reveal. The students know that we are going to be working on a class podcast, but they don’t know how we are actually going to put it together. We now have the iPads, the protective cases, the screen protectors, the apps (garageband), and we’ve experimented with accessibility features.

In Guided Reading, we’ve been working through a book called ‘Our Class Podcast’ which details a class from Ontario that has been producing podcasts for about five years. We’ve listened to samples of their podcast – (portableradio.ca) and we’ve discussed different segments that the students enjoyed.

In Social Studies we’ve discussed personal histories, looked at diversity, and went on a field trip to Roedde House (an historic house in downtown Vancouver, filled with artifacts of the Roedde family’s personal history). 

Now we are going to move in two directions. Firstly, we want the students to familiarize themselves with the technology – especially the app garageband, so they can record, compile and edit the podcast. Secondly, we will continue working on our personal histories in Socials and Writing. We hope that through this writing and research that they will gain insights into “How We Got Here”.

We look forward to telling you how the students reacted to being a part of this exciting project. Talk to you soon,

Linda, Nick, and Randi