Week 3 - Soundation.com

"Successful teachers are subject matter experts and have a deep knowledge of pedagogy" (Bauer pg. 23).  It is difficult to teach a subject you have no knowledge of or to teach a subject that of which you have a minimum understanding.  Most school districts now require that teachers use technology in the classroom.  But most education programs in colleges are not preparing the teachers for this.  It is hard to use technology in the music classroom when the teacher has no knowledge on how to use technology for music.

This week, we were introduced to a website called soundation.com.  This is a site that works in the cloud and allows consumers to sign up for a free account.  In order to obtain more options with the program, you may purchase the program as well.  Soundation is similar to incredibox.com in that it uses loops.  However, this program is much more complicated than incredibox.  There are many more options from many loops and midi files to creating your own midi file for your song.

I have many 6th grade students who aren't so interested in music.  However my 6th graders are incredibly interested in technology and what they can do with it.  The opposite if true of many of my 4th and 5th graders who LOVE music and can't get enough.  But with my 6th graders, it's like trying to pull teeth to get them interested in anything musical.  My 5th grade choir has 45 students and my 6th grade choir has only 21.  When I introduced incredibox.com to them a couple of weeks ago, they LOVED it.  I got emails from teachers and parents alike asking what the program is called because their students wish to use it at home.  The students kept asking all week if they could make another composition because they enjoyed it so much!!

The program itself it definitely more complicated than incredibox.  The biggest problem I encountered was the yellow loop button.  It was explained in the tutorial video that in order to create the loop, you must click the loop button and then drag the yellow bar across the parts you wished to loop.  However, when I would click it and try to extend the loop bar, it would drag it instead of extend.  It took me a while to get it to work!

I think I could use soundation.com in my classroom with my 6th graders.  I definitely don't have computers for every student to work on their own.  However, we could explore the program as a class and create a class composition as we did with incredibox.  My 6th graders are incredibly tech savvy and this would really peak their interest!