Garage Band in the Classroom

Picture by Ed Yourdon

 

I had such a fun time creating our podcast this last week on garage band that I wanted to know what else I could do with it. I found this article on 14 ways to use garage band in the classroom, which had some great ideas and it also made me think of a few other ways to use garage band. Here are a few that I thought might be neat:

• Informational writing. My students have to write an informational piece this year and as a fun way to present their final draft, I thought they could record a reading of it with background music to fit their writing topic. (For instance, if they chose to research a person, they could look up the style of music that was popular at the time and choose a song from that genre.)
• For studying different genres in reading, you could have students work in groups to create a podcast that teaches the rest of the class about their assigned genre with appropriate music or sound effects.
• For help with tricky math or science vocabulary, have students create songs that use the words in the correct way.
• With imovie and garage band, instead of creating a final poster at the end of a social studies unit, students could create a commercial for next year's students describing and showing all the things they will learn about during the unit.

These are just a few ideas that are starting to form in my mind, but they already seem much more engaging than traditional types of lessons. The best part is that I don't need to have an ipad or computer for every single child in the class. These are all ideas that could be worked on at different times with different groups of students. I hope this gives others some ideas as well!