I used this video by Steve Vai as an example video from YouTube when I was teaching my students how to embed a video into their blog. I fully intended to remove this video at a later time because it didn't really have much to do with educational technology.
After watching the video I realized what an awesome guitarist Vai is and how well he has orchestrated his group to support him. I decided that it has everything to do with educational technology so decided to leave it in.
Besides, this is MY blog and I, Dr. Z, am Reflecting!!!!!
Had to share this one with you. This group, theFunTheory.com, believes that we can get more people to exercise if we make it fun to do it. In this video, filmed at the Odenplan metro station in Stockholm, Sweden, the group has placed musical "plates" on the stairs so that when people walk up and down the stairs, it will play like a piano.
2 out of 3 people decided to take the stairs with this added incentive. Some just ran up the stairs in sequence but some used the stairs to play music. I would have done the later. What would you have done? theFunTheory.com is an organization funded by Volkswagen that is based upon the theory that making things fun can be used to change people's behavior for the better. They have a number of videos showing examples including:
I have been trying to find Free/Royalty-Free Music and Sound Effects and have not been as successful as I have anticipated. What do you use? Here are some suggestions that I have received: Kathy Schrock suggests using Soundzabound. She has used it for a few years and have been very happy with it. She says that the company is great to work with and the students really love the loops. They are categorized by broad topic, and students can easily find what they need. It is true royalty-free music and can be used for items in school and on the Web. I should note that this is subscription service where you pay $99/year/volume. Go there to identify the specifics.
Freeplay is a great source, too, but it has certain restrictions on use, as outlined in their policy. Here is the educational use portion of Freeplay. It cannot be used for anything re-published. If I understand this correctly, they charge $500/year to send you a hard drive full of music. That you can then use under their license.
Soundsnap is a membership source that offers royalty-free sounds. Soundsnap has a free membership (allows 5 free downloads/month) and then you have a variety of other membership options.
Soungle is a a free, public domain resource for sound FX and musical instrument samples. It has a growing database of sounds from which you can choose. These sounds are downloadable as .wav files.
Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. This music has expired copyrights so they are recording the music to create sources that have no copyrights. Their mission is to "Set music Free" They even provide the code to embed music:
Just wanted to share this video that won the April ISTE Digital Storytelling prize. This video is created by Matt Hildahl (and his students) who is a high school math teacher at the East Valley School District in Spokane, Washington.
Mr. Hildahl goes by the name, 2 Bitty, because he claims to be half as good as 50 Cent. I don't know, never have I seen students having as much fun reciting the Pythagorean Theorem.
I couldn't find any more of 2 Bitty's work. Do you know of some? Do you have some examples of using music (or rap) in math class?
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