elearning for music

Much as I have drifted away from content creation recently, in favour of social and inquiry learning, I still find a need to make music language practice exercises for my students.  The Keyboard project now has a directory.  And I’m looking at rhythm/melody transcription.  I only have multiple choice for this so far, but a project I would love to explore would be a Flash file that allows simple notation input - basic pitch and rhythm, as multiple choice is seriously limited as a learning tool for transcription skills.

Jing is yet another web tool I found through Classroom 2.0.  It is a screencasting tool with some major WOW factors and is even making me wonder whether I need Snapz Pro.  Here’s my first attempt - a short tutorial about the bass clef.   It’s a bit fiddly embedding Flash in edublogs - you have to copy the embed code then find the url from the code and pixel width and height, rather than just copy and paste as you would with wikispaces or some other bloggs, but it’s worth the effort!

Sav is God. Or for those of you who don’t know Chris Savage, he is a web programmer who has helped me out on many occasions with Flash programming and his understanding of what is needed and the best way to function makes him God-like!

Latest project is a re-useable object for making formative music language exercises. The exercises aren’t that exciting but the ease of creation is. To make a new exercise I just edit questions and answers in a text (XML) file and the exercise name in another text (PHP) file and I have a new test, with auto-marking and data submitted to me - sweet! I’m going to ask for some updates but the files work fine as they are. Once you have the template (which I can provide) and a tutorial on editing (which I will do) each test takes just a few minutes to make!
basic scales 1

basic scales 2

chords 1

chords 2

Oh good grief - this is Sketchcast! I need to get a tablet (or something ) to input, ‘cos with a mouse I regress to being 3 as you can see! But what a tool.

Animoto offers an engine that makes instant videos from your images and music.  A day does not pass without me stressing to student musicians the need to create imagery with their music so there is no excuse now.  This service offers entry level video production.  Short videos are free and unlimited full length videos are $30 a year.