Making SParks

At last - our new build

2008-05-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. There's only so much time you can put up with the facilities we had before becoming thoroughly disenfranchised...but we moved into our new build after the Easter holidays and it has made a huge difference.

We now have 8 rooms (including 5 small and one large practise rooms), the bigger ones of which each have 15 computers. Every key stage 3 student is opening an artist account (we're about halfway there) and will be recording tracks. We have an after school numu club but in truth the kids are coming in at all hours to explore numu and record their own tracks.

We're about to have a training session for some of our kids in the hope that we will be able to select a core of responsible students to help run the label - I'm looking forward to that.

I always knew it could be like this and it's fantastic fun coming to school again!

So check out www.numu.org.uk/spark to hear some of the students making full use of numu.

status quoing it

2007-11-30T14:21:00.000-08:00

(Sorry I added photos and then realised that I shouldbe asking the kids first - and can I delete them?....Can't work it out. So I've made them tiny until someome can help me!)

We had our 'numu day' yesterday and it was really good fun - a great excuse to get a load of g and t kids together and do a musical futures type carousel to teach them 'Rockin' all over the World'.

It's proving difficult to get together with local music teachers - all schools were invited and only 1 attended...it was really good to see them though. They're one of our feeder primaries and they sounded really keen about starting numu.

Having Cliff and Fran (from Leeds Artfoms) there yesterday reminded me of how much exciting stuff there is going on in music - I've been wading through the quagmire that is the reality of teaching in an inner city school and it's easy to feel isolated as a music teacher in the best of situations. I came away from the day feeling like a proper creative music teacher again rather than a glorified babysitter. I would recommend some time out with your g and t kids if you're feeling jaded!

So - next plans are to follow up the primary links - I am working closely with 3 of them who are contributing to our Carol Service. Cliff suggested that we could have our own network with our feeders - meaning we could have charts across the schools and so on. That would have so many benefits for music within the schools but also throughout the community. In a community like this (socio-economically deprived) anything that can bring people together is a bonus. Why can't numu be one of those things?

enterprise week

2007-11-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Being a business and enterprise college we have an enterprise week - so we are focusing on numu this week. We will talk about musicians who use the internet to launch their music and discuss how it works. We'll do our best to record some music and really push the artist accounts.

Meanwhile the art department are working on logos with KS4 so hopefully we'll have a great logo soon....

must do better

2007-10-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since posting and since it's half term I can catch up.

There have still been a steady stream of kids interested in numu but I haven't been recording as much as I've wanted to - the realities of developing a new department (both of us are new) in an inner city school.

However there are big plans afoot - I have pitched NUMU to SLT and they love the ideas I have so they will be very supportive.

First I am organising a NUMU day (29th November) which will involve a visit from the website manager (Cliff, if this is not your title - or you prefer 'numu god' or something, let me know), lessons specifically focussed on NUMU, recording workshops in the afternoon and then a meeting with as many Sheffield music teachers who want to come. I'm hoping to get the local press interested and SLT have asked me to send a letter out to parents too.

Something that partcularly excited SLT was the suggestion that NUMU could play a part in primary-secondary transition. Having been a head of year 7 (the exact title was head of year 6 and 7 - ie transition) I know that bridging units are becoming more and more popular. If secondaries and their feeder primary schools were able to share projects and their outcomes through NUMU I think that would be rather exciting. So I've invited primary music specialists to the NUMU day too.

We have enterprise week coming up too - and I think the music department will be focussing on NUMU in big way. We might look at a band releasing stuff online (eg Radiohead - any excuse to bring them into my lessons) and think about the marketing implications etc. Or we might just have a week of competitive whole class recording sessions......fun fun.

ever ready

2007-10-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

And another thing about the edirol r-09 - it's out and recording before the kids can change their minds. No sooner are they laughing at it thinking it's a brick of a phone than they are creating their own piece of recording history.

Things are hotting up now - we're starting to have people coming to us asking to be recorded as well. They've experienced whole class recording sessions, either in person or by listening to the finished track, and they are thinking about what musical skills they want to share with the world.

I'm setting specific numu homeowrks - creating a profile, choosing a favourite track or leaving a couple of shouts. And you get to tick the ICT box on your lesson plans.

encouraging the numu underground

2007-10-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

I have always been a goody two-shoes and the older I get the more I regret that. So I am so chuffed with the (albeit mild) problems I've caused. While talking to my top set year nines about numu (their starter activity today was to write a profile for numu which they're going to type in for homework) they complained that they couldn't use numu in the ICT rooms because it had been blocked by the school. They went on 'yeah miss, all the interesting sites have been blocked, bebo, youtube, msn, numu...'

numu has evidently 'arrived' at Sheffield Park!

So I will be making a trip to the ICT network guy's office on Monday.

The practicalities...recording

2007-10-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Being a virtual technophobe, this was what I was most worried about when I started. At my previous school we had a Coomber CD recorder - a nice piece of kit. I would make the recording, take it home, spend a while finding a suitable MP3 converter and then converting the file to be able to upload it onto numu. OK, but fairly time intensive.

So on joining my new school (and not knowing enough about recording live on Cubase), I ordered an point and shoot Edirol R-09 MP3 recorder for both of us in the department. I am very impressed so far. It's practically foolproof and a track can be uploaded within 3 minutes of recording it.The kids love that of course, so I make a big thing of it - they can watch the process on the interactive whiteboard - and they love the fact that just a few minutes after they performed it, anyone in the world with access to the internet can hear their work.

There are apparently some good deals going for people who are using numu and other musical futures approaches as Roland (the makers of the Edirol) are sponsors.

That's the technical stuff out of the way for now. It doesn't interest me at all... Check out www.numu.org.uk/spark

The first track...

2007-10-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

Having a brand new numu account in a brand new school (in which I still have to build up the respect (man) ) is fairly terrifying. A bit like being faced with a blank piece of manuscript paper. So I have decided on a plan on attack which will follow more or less what I did at the previous school.

Get KS4 involved, play loads of examples of other students' work, get them writing their profiles and then get recording. As soon as you have a high quality track from year 10 or 11 students at your school, you're winning - a buzz will start doing the rounds and before you know it, random kids will start saying to you on the corridor "that mumu/munu/thingy (sic) website is great miss!"

So I have spent a lesson with my BTEC year 11s introducing the website, getting them writing and entering their profiles, and thinking about what tracks they'd like on there. Because they're more musically mature (and fussy) they will typically take longer to record something - but you may already have recordings you can just bung on there. Purists may shoot me down but I don't think the quality needs to be superb at this point - it's all about getting the buzz going. So pick something which will appeal to the kids but don't worry if it's not great to our ears.

At this point then a word about the first track on www.numu.org.uk/spark (which appears at the bottom): yes, it is me leading the call and response, and yes it is terrible. So there. But it has had over 5o listens, including the vast majority of the year 7 class who performed in it. Let me spell it out - these kids, from one of the most deprived areas in Britain, S2 in Sheffield, have gone home and listened with enthusiasm to a piece of music they performed in their music lesson. Can't say fairer than that (I seem to have reverted to Estuary English. Must Do Better).

Obssessed? With good reason I think...

2007-10-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

A good measure of any website is whether it can keep you awake long into the night reading and listening to its wares. Since discovering numu my average hours of sleeping have reduced and my husband now snorts when he hears the words 'I'm just going to check numu' but it has had a huge impact on my teaching and non-teaching time at school.

numu is a website which allows schools and individual students to upload their own performances and compositions in a completely safe interent environment. More than that, it invites students to comment on each others' work, and has several charts of the best and most-listened-to music.

I started using numu at my previous school in Essex (www.numu.org.uk/estuary) and, having moved jobs to become a head of music in an inner-city academy in Sheffield, I am starting the process all over again with the new label SPark. (www.numu.org.uk/spark)

This blog will chart my new label's progress, successes and failures and will hopefully give a few other music teachers the courage to bite the bullet and go for it.