(a blurb in the local newspaper earlier this week)
Last night, we held our benefit rock concert to support the American Red Cross in the wake of tornadoes here in Western Massachusetts and in the South. It was extremely hot on the stage — the heat outside was in the 90s — and I wasn’t sure what the audience would look like. But it was OK — there were about 60 people or so, I think.
We raised more than $500 for the Red Cross, which is better than I expected and indicates a high level of generosity by the audience.
On stage, we had a mix of teacher and student acts, and I was so happy to be able to watch my current and former students shine in the spotlights on the stage as musicians and performers. I was up there, too, playing with my new configuration of our band, but it was watching my students that really made the night.
There were about a dozen student performers who performed everything from the Beatles to Kanye West to Lady Gaga to Green Day. It reminded me of my time in high school, when a band I was in took part in a talent show of bands, and although we were not all that great, I still remember that magical feeling of taking the stage and looking out, and playing before people.
Sure, our event (which was organized and run by a student of mine, with a little help) was designed to raise awareness and money for families hurt hard by the weather, but it was also a chance to turn the night over to the students, some of whom don’t shine in the classroom but do shine on the stage.
Peace (in the songs),
Kevin
PS — I do have a video of the night and will work on a montage one of these days.
I am finally getting around to sharing some of the poetry podcasts we did last week with our iPod touches. Here are some “Inside This ….” poems that used Figurative Language techniques to get at the essence of inanimate objects.
I like this one because you have to know the child — full of energy and off-beat ideas and a creative thinker. His poem is entitled “Inside this Lightbulb.”
And here is a folder with some of the other poems.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
I’m looking at my calendar and yikes, we’re almost done with the school year.
We’re about to wrap up our unit around poetry this week and I often shift into songwriting for a day or two. This year, I might do something a little bit different. I am mulling over the idea of having each of my four classes collaborate as a class on a rap/hip-hop song, using Garageband as the recording platform. I haven’t done much of this full-class collaboration nor used Garageband much for looping sounds, so I can’t quite say how it will go.
But I started to compose some opening lines that will guide them forward, and then see what happens. I am hoping that I can get at least two or three students from each class to come on up and “sing” the rap they write as a class. And if we find a good chorus, maybe everyone can chime in.
I was recently inspired by this blog post entitled How and Why to Write a Class Rap. If they can do it, why not us? And as for a theme, since we are at the end of the year, why not a rap that captures the identity of them as a class?
Here’s how I may go about it:
What do you think? Anyone done collaborative songwriting with their students?
Peace (in the hip, in the hop, in the hip-hop-hip),
Kevin
For a few months, a student and I have been working to organize a live music benefit concert at our school featuring staff and student acts. We were motivated first by events in Japan, and then by the devastation in the areas around Joplin, and now local events have overtaken us as a tornado hit hard right down the road from us here in Western Massachusetts, causing significant damage to homes and businesses and families. As a result, our focus is now to gather donations to support the American Red Cross in its efforts to help local families.
The concert is this Wednesday night at our school.
I am playing music with a lot of people that night, and I just realized that I have quite a few songs to learn, along with the songs I am doing with my new R&B band, where I am playing mostly saxophone on songs like Midnight Hour, Do You Love Me, and Johnny B. Goode. But with other groups of teachers and students, I am bouncing around on guitar and bass. I am doing one original song — Innocent Boy, written for my sons when they were just little dudes.
Here are some of the videos I am trying to burn into my brain for this Wednesday night:
Peace (in the reaching out),
Kevin
I know it’s not a numbers game, but I was pretty surprised the other day when I noticed that in two days of using our iPod Touch devices (and one Blue Snowball microphone for our Poems for Two Voices project) for podcasting with Cinch, my students had posted 176 podcasts.
I have 80 students, so the numbers do make sense, but for me, the sheer volume shows the ease of use with the device, and the app, and the desire to make their voices heard in the world.
Here are some of the Poems for Two Voices — I grabbed them off of our Cinch site and put them into my Box site for easier grouping, sharing and embedding.
But you can also wander through our Cinch Podcasts at the Cinchcast site, too.
Peace (in the poems and podcasts),
Kevin
Yesterday, I pulled out our suitcase of iPod touches for the first time in my class (although it is not the first time they have used them — they did an interesting science project on cell mitosis with the touches) But I wanted to see if we could do some podcasting with the devices, using Cinch as our app. (It’s free!)
I have to say — it mostly worked like a charm. Even though I had to first “talk” through what they needed to do, since I could not connect the device to my board, they were on the app in minutes and podcasting around the room with ease. And the only glitch, which I realized later, is that some kids turned off the iPod before Cinch had a chance to finish its upload of files online, and it seems like a few of the files may be gone now (I had hoped they would sit in “pending mode” on the device until it powered up again but I guess not.)
I had them use an entry from their independent reading journals, in which they introduced a character from their book to me. Here, though, the audience changed — from me, to the world. They changed the introduction to “Dear Listener” and adapted the writing to fit the podcast of their piece.
We now have an “album” of character sketches at our class Cinch Page, and I have downloaded some of the podcasts into my Box account for easier sharing as a folder. I am pretty impressed by the audio quality, and by the confidence of my students to jump right into the technology.
The activity yesterday was to prepare them for tomorrow, when we will be doing more podcasting of their Poems for Two Voices with a partner which they have been working on in class. It’s going to be a bit tricky because I was hoping to find a way to connect two headphone/microphone sets to one iPod, but that didn’t work. So, we will have them huddle around a single microphone and go from there. They are surprisingly resilient when it comes to Mr. H’s Workaround Magic.
Peace (on the device),
Kevin
My class is working on Poems for Two Voices this week, and our plan is to use our school’s iPod iTouches for podcasting. I’ve gone around and around on the best way to go about this, and decided that I would set up a classroom account on Cinch and have us podcast and post on there. I’ve already had to think of some workarounds, mostly because our iTouches are not the latest generation and we need to use a headphone/microphone unit for recording.
In my head, I had this great vision of two students, each with headphones, connected by a jack splitter to the iTouch, recording. Well, reality hit. The touches have an odd jack input, and my splitter that I usually use for connecting headphones won’t work. So, we are going to have sit the headphone w/microphone in front of each pair, and record like that. We’ll live with the background noise, I guess. On Tuesday, I am going to let them podcast a few of their own poems, individually, so they can get the experience of working the headphones.
To make sure the idea would work (always a good thing), I wrote a poem myself about writing and math, and asked my math teaching colleague to record it with me. He took the writing part and I took the math part, just to flip our normal roles. It sounds OK, actually.
TheWriter and the Mathematician- A Poem for 2 Voices
Peace (in the voices),
Kevin
We recently finished up The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. It’s a book that is quite challenging for my sixth graders — difficult vocabulary, twisting plot arcs, a vernacular that feels strange on their tongue. But it is such a great book and full of so many things to talk about: race, class, gender, foreshadowing, character development, etc.
In order to help them visualize some of the more intense action scenes of mutiny, punishment, challenge and confrontation, I had my students draw some comics. What I found is that by giving them a fun, simple way to “see” the action, they seemed to better understand the consequences of the scenes.
So, until a movie version of the book gets made, we have some comics:
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
I knew that when we launched into our recent essay project around environmental themes that we would be sharing them out at the Voices on the Gulf website. We’ve been using the site now and then throughout the year for inquiry work around the environment, starting with the Gulf Oil Spill and then shifting outward.
But I was worried that essays would become too text-heavy, particularly when there are close to 80 of them. I finally decided that I wanted our students to podcast their essays, and Voicethread seemed the easiest and most logical way to do that, since all of their podcasts could be collected around some general themes and pulled together in one large project that could be embedded in multiple sites.
Here, then, is the Environmental Essay Voicethread. We’ve left a slide open for viewers to leave their own comments, too, so feel free to share the thread with your own students and ask them to contribute.
Peace (in the threads),
Kevin
