Last year, I wasn't able to do Recorder Karate with my students because I had morning playground supervision every day. Prior to last year, before school was a prime time for assessing students since I don't have enough time during class to listen to every child. Without that time, I just couldn't meet the needs of my Recorder Karate students. Being unable to do Recorder Karate was disappointing to me as well as my students. I decided that I need to try to think of a remedy to this problem so we don't have the same issue next year.
Yesterday, another music teacher posted his Recorder Karate plan on the Music K-8 Mailing List. It was very well set up. The thing that really caught my eye was his Recorder Karate Testing Hotline. The teacher had it set up so that students would call his school voicemail between 5 p.m. - 7 p.m. and recorder their recorder test to his voice mail. How cool is that? I never thought of that. One problem: I am notoriously bad at checking my voice mail and the red light only blinks about once every 10 seconds, so I never see it. Hmmm. What other options might there be? So I went searching. I found two interesting things in my search this morning. One has great possibility for The Return of Recorder Karate and the other won't work for Recorder Karate, but has other possibilities for the music classroom. And both are free.
Vocaroo looks like the answer to our Recorder Karate problems. It is a simple online recording feature. Click Record. Play your Recorder Karate test. Click Stop. Listen to the recording. If it is sufficient, email it to the teacher. Super Slick...if it works. I'll try it out in the fall and see how students do with it.
The other site I found that was interesting is the audio portion of Aviary (the site also have photo editing and design features). This looks like it might be something PC users can use in lieu of Garage Band. You can even create your own loops. I have Garage Band at school, so I don't know if I will use this site, but I found it interesting none-the-less.
I was playing with Vocaroo and was really disappointed because I couldn't get the email option to work (which would mean I couldn't use it the way I hoped). Well, it suddenly hit me that the messages were probably being viewed as spam. Duh. They were. So problem solved and I think Vocaroo will be an awesome tool next year.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this site!
ReplyDeleteMrs. K
You're welcome. I hope it works well for you.
ReplyDelete