The first technology I chose to explore was the website www.jamstudio.com. Some of my students had mentioned this site to me in the past, but I had never taken the time to explore it before. It is an easy and fun way for students to create their own songs without a steep learning curve. The sharing ability of this site also allows students to share their work and listen to others. This makes it extremely "digital native" friendly.
Check out my song "Driving Time" at
http://www.jamstudio.com/Studio/FWSongShare.asp?SongNum=528694&SongId=528855. Once the page loads, simply press the play button in the lower left portion of the screen.
Pros
Jam studio has excellent instrument sounds and is very easy to use. You can use this site without logging in or creating an account. Most of the features available are free. The styles of music and instruments provided are extremely engaging and desirable to even the most cynical of 8th grade students.
Cons
To actually save your work, you need to put in an email address and create an account. This is against my district's technology usage policies. To access some of the advanced features on the site, you need to pay a monthly subscription. During playback, there seems to be a delay or lag between measures. In order to eliminate that, the site recommends you pay the monthly subscription.
Uses in the Classroom
As a general music teacher, this would be an excellent way to teach chords and chord symbols to my students. The students can easily and instantly hear the chord progressions in a variety of styles. It can also be a non-threatening beginning to a composition unit. Since student need not be aware of note names and rhythms, they can jump right into the creative process. Although this can be a positive, I can see how it might give the wrong impression to students how a song is usually put together.
For a non-music teacher, this could be a great way to create works of music to go with other multimedia presentations. Instead of sound effects, a student could create an original piece of music to play with their PowerPoint presentations or their movies. This would only work, however, if the student is allowed to create an account to save their work. If not, the program could really only be used for exploration. That's okay if you subscribe to the process rather than product camp (which I do :)!). Since you need not have music reading ability to use this, it could easily be used by any area teacher.
Implementation
Because the students will be unable to save their work, I will probably only offer this as an optional activity at best. There are times when students complete their work early, and need a structured and open ended task. This site would work well for that. I will probably use this in at the beginning of my sixth grade composition unit before they start their saved compositions in
Finale NotePad. This will get the creative juices flowing before they need to start worrying about note names and note values.
If possible, I'd like to take my fourth grade students (who aren't always in a computer lab) into the lab to use this to explore chord progressions. This may prove difficult, since computer lab time at my elementary school is at a premium, but it would be extremely engaging for the students if I can schedule them in.
