Music, Blogs, Podcasting
Jim Mould, Head of Music at Mary Webb, yesterday set up the Music Blog ready for interactive work with learners. Once we’d discussed the concepts of blogging and podcasting Jim was really enthusiastic about using it with learners to enhance the curriculum. Of course there are security concerns, like giving out pupils’ email addresses in a public environment (they’re not), who manages the server at ethink (it’s me) and the ins and outs of letting learners have their own blogs. It’s refreshing that teachers are thinking about these security issues, but I’m certain that I’ve covered all bases at eThink. At least, that’s what the pilot projects show.
Next week Jim’s going to look closer at podcasting. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had had Apple Macs with all their robustness” we mused, “and Garageband’s royalty-free music clips and sounds”. Yes, well, there you go. But PCs and Audacity work just fine, and it should be possible to build up a library of Creative Commons music clips from various places - there’s a whole sitefull at Magnatune, and plenty more Out There on the web. I shall endeavour to compile a list of links to useful sites. Meanwhile, we quickly went through the motions of creating an audio file wth Audacity and publishing it on the Webbmusic blog. More next week (edit - we deleted the first one).
One thing came up that I hadn’t thought of - what are the royalty issues concerning pupils doing cover versions and publishing them in a podcast? Answers in a comment to this post please…