Back in the Fall of 2005 when I was first experimenting with Wikis in my middle school classroom, Eric Oatman, a news and features editor at the School Library Journal interviewed a number of teachers across the country (including me) about how we were using Wikis with our students.
The product of these interviews was an article on their website sharing a number of cool ways to integrate wikis into classes of all sorts. Though this article was written in 2005, it still provides a good overview of the possibilities of using wikis in your classroom. Since 2005, there have been many innovations in Wiki technology, most notably that many sites such as PBWiki.com and Wikispaces.com easily allow you and your students to create and manage wiki entries without having to know the special “markup” language many wiki interfaces required back in 2005. As with any technology, innovation continues and many become easier to use. Such has been the case with wikis over the past three years.
Back when I originally created the Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing for my middle school students, I browsed around and tested a number of free wiki sites and finally settled on PBWiki.com. I still use PBWiki today for my college classes because of its ease of use and multimedia features.
Since installing their new “point and click” interface back in January, users can now easily upload and post photos and streaming videos from YouTube, streaming audio from YackPack.com, add a chat room, install Google Gadgets, among other things.
As I have continued to experiment with wikis in music-related classes, the ability for students to create entries embedded with video and audio has become important. Though most wikis are optimized for textual and, to an extent, photographic-based collaboration, my students are moving toward conveying their ideas in audio and video form. Earlier this week Mojiti.com, previously featured on my blog here, released a new set of features that my students are already beginning to take advantage of.
The latest updates to Mojiti include:
Multimedia annotations. Users can overlay/embed their own audio or video into a video.
Freehand drawing support. Users can add their own Madden-style writing overlays.
Mojiti-to-go Bookmarklet. This feature enables you to add a plug-in to your web browser which allows you to add Mojiti features to any streaming video hosted on the web.
Watch below or click here to see the new features in action.
Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:
Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.
Ning.com(special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.
The MENC Creativity Special Research Interest Group (SRIG) just launched their new website: http://www.musicalcreativity.com. This website is a great resource for teachers and researchers who are interested in issues related to musical creativity and resources for the classroom.
The first featured newsletter is written by Dr. Susan Mills from Appalachian State University. Be sure to check out her ideas for arranging and composing in the classroom
I currently serve as Web Editor for MusicalCreativity.com. So, if you have any feedback or suggestions for content, please feel free to email me and let us know. Also, if you have something to contribute, please email our Creativity SRIG Chair Michele Kaschub.
