The IHC and CHDS Music Cooperative Project - Technology

In this post, I will discuss the technology used in my collaborative project with my sister-in-law and friend, Sole, who teaches English to students in Chile. To view our most recent collaboration, see our blog. You can make a project of this sort as simple or complex as you like.  You can still have a powerful exchange with one song. 

Our process was as follows:

1. We first established a blog on www.blogger.com
2. I then chose to film my students singing and performing the dance for, "Turn the Glasses Over."  We wanted to not only perform the song, but teach Sole's students to perform the dance.  So the students worked together to compile a sequence of instructions.  After we filmed them performing the song, the performed the movement very slowly, which we filmed. 
3. We then recorded individual students speaking the instructions for the dance using garage Band.  I then shared this recording with iTunes so that I could access it in iMovie. 
4. I took all of this film footage and voice recording and imported them into iMovie, edited and created our instructional video. 
5. Export the video.
6. Upload to Blogger

Of course, you can also post just sound recordings, which we have done in the past, also providing notation for pieces. Other items that we shared were simple messages on Blogger, we posted photos and notation, interacted on Skype.  We plan to try Google Hang-Out in the future, hoping that we can record these interactions without the use of an external video camera.

Below is a final list of the technology we used, along with a few suggestions if you use a PC, rather than a MAC.

• video camera/phone
• e-mail
• Blogger
• iTunes
• Garage Band (Audacity)
• iMovie (Windows Movie Maker, YouTube)
• Skype (Google Hang-Out)

I hope this helps clarify the technology side of our collaborative project.  My next post will describe the different forms our collaborations have taken and recommendations for the logistics behind this sort of project.  Thanks for reading!

Welcome!

This blog is a bi-product of an international collaborative project between my music students at Capitol Hill Day School, an independent school located in Washington, DC, and students of the Instituto de Humanidades, Concepción. 

The project arose out of my interest in finding authentic folk songs for children in Spanish, and the interest of my colleague (and sister-in-law), Soledad Deocares, to enable her English language students to communicate in English with native speakers. 

In this project, students shared folk songs and cultural information with each other.  This allowed the students to learn more about each others' cultures and created a lot of excitement in the classroom.

This experience was so rich and powerful for the students that I am now committed to continuing this sort of work, connecting with other teachers abroad and wish to encourage other teachers to enrich their classrooms by collaborating internationally with the use of technology. 

My next post will outline the step-by-step process for this specific project that we did together. Following that, I will continue to share ideas and resources and welcome your ideas, as well.  We can also stay connected via Facebook.  Thanks for checking in!