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Garage Band and Choral Assessment

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An interesting way to use Garage Band! (Part 1 and Part 2)
 
Ever done anything like this?
Listening to students individually takes time—a precious commodity for choral directors. MENC member Shari Tarleton uses GarageBand to assess her choral students individually in a group setting, and it’s saved a lot of time and effort.
 
Simple Steps to Success
 
Step 1—Set up: Work with your technical staff to set up folders in the school’s shared storage space for your students’ files. Discuss size limitations. 
 
Step 2–Training: Teach students how to record themselves with GarageBand and store their files.
 
Tarleton walks students through the process, posts instructions, and provides a handout. Here are her helpful hints: Everyone records at once. Talk students through the process step-by-step the first time, moving around to help students. Establish a signal for students to use when they’re ready (e.g., thumbs up). Prepare for technical issues (e.g., problems uploading GarageBand, dead batteries, students can’t find GarageBand on the dock) Be very clear about starting and stopping. Count in to hit “record,” ensure students know where they’re stopping in the music. Record only sections of music—16 to 32 bars—or the files will be too big to manage. Ask students to turn off GarageBand’s metronome (a common problem). Allow time for students to listen to themselves as soon as they’re done. They’ll do it anyway.

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Comments

  2. Or, just use a digital handheld recorder. You can pass it around during the rehearsal as the whole ensemble is singing. There are several that are fairly inexpensive. There is less technology involved, and you can load it into any software you want – as most of these recorders just look like a flash drive to all computers.

  3. We’ve been creating practice files for years but in the past 4 years – we’ve been expecting students to use them, and proving it by submitting recordings of themselves singing the assignments using Garageband or Audacity.  
     
    The exponential factor of every student coming to the rehearsal having prepared the music is pretty amazing.  Technology finally allows us to replicate the standards that other classrooms have demonstrating individual ownership of content.
     
    The benefits don’t stop there either.  
     -We have records of evaluation for grading purposes
     -We no longer do auditions, the recordings are their auditions for choir placement

  6. No, I haven’t, but that’s a fascinating read.
     
    It’s really a brilliant solution especially to deal with scheduling for individual singers.  At first I felt the entire process (of listening to each file, etc) would take up so much time but then I realized that it actually takes less time than listening to the actual singers independently.
     
    Now the question is how many teachers have the luxury of every student having a computer that’s identically set up like that.

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