I love to use music when I teach. It is great for transitions. After a while, kids just need to hear how a song starts and they know exactly what to do. So…once they’re used to a song and they know what to do in the first five seconds, why do you need the rest of the song?
For today’s app of the week, I’ve created my own in a quirky sort of way! If you’re looking at this on an iPad, simply click this link to our ElliotTunes (an open permission docushare collection). Do you see that arrow coming out of a rectangle to the left of your address bar? Touch that, and one of your options will be “add to Home Screen”. It will make a new button for your home screen that will go directly to this site when you touch it.
In this collection, I have “cut” a few random songs from my music library. You can find songs 10-50 seconds long, depending on how long you want your transition to be. Play the song and teach your students how to be cleaned up and in the next spot ready to learn before the song runs out. No more “teacher counting”… You know, one…two…threeeeeeeee…fooooooouur…four and a halfffffffff…fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive! Seriously???? Why do we do it? 5 seconds means 5 seconds – and here’s a song to show you how long that really is!
If you need to pause or stop the song early, you need to get to your music controls by doing the Elliott Shuffle…(Tap, Tap, slide to the right)
This is an incredible idea!