Sharing Instrumental Performance Videos at St Aidan’s High School
Context
Alan Jenkins
Alan Jenkins is a music teacher at St Aidan’s High School in North Lanarkshire. After receiving a small amount of training in school Alan could see that he wanted to make use of it. He wanted to use Glow to share instrumental performance videos with his pupils. Alan felt that pupils will have pieces of music demonstrated to them in school but then this moment is gone and it is difficult for the pupils to remember what to do. He feels this is an issue that Glow provides a solution for.
Guitar Course
The intention was to let all pupils hear how a piece of music should sound but also to be able to follow along with hand positions and fingering and be able to replicate this themselves at home. This is available in guitar, keyboard and drum-kit. The original films have been captured straight-on but Alan plans to film from different angles to get better views of hand position and fingering.
Some of the videos can be quite large and sometimes this causes problems when uploading and playing within Glow’s document libraries. Alan is considering using Glow wikis as a development from his current work.
This Cookbook will foucs on how Alan has started to make the instrumental performances available to St Aidan’s pupils and his tour will take you through what he has currently set up in the Glow Group. The how-to videos in the Method section will focus specifically on how to link to a document from an image in a text editor web part. There are further videos in the Impact section where Alan discusses his motivation and his future plans.
Ingredients
What did Alan need to do to allow his pupils to make use of the Instrumental Performance Videos Glow Group:
- A staff Glow account within St Aidan’s High School
- Pupils provisioned and allocated their Glow usernames and passwords
- A Glow Group created at school level
- S3 pupils set up with at least Readers with Disucssion membership of this Glow Group
- Audio and video files uploaded to folders within the document library
- Various pages with text editor web parts and images linked to the audio and video files
- A Discussion Board started to encourage pupils to ask questions about the videos and the performances
- An alert set for Alan on the Discussion Board
You will be able to see the whole Glow Group in the Virtual Tour video in the Method section below.
Discussion Board
Alan thinks that the Discussion Board is an essential part of the Instrumental Performance Glow Group. He feels it is very important for the pupils to be able to ask questions about the pieces of music that they may still have after viewing the videos and when practising themselves. Alan has an alert set for the discussion board so that he will be sent an email when a pupil asks a question even if it is during the school holidays.
Recipe
In the first video below, Alan takes you on a virtual tour of his Glow Group. The following videos will show you how to replicate what Alan has set up in his Instrumental Performance Glow Group.
Alan gives a tour of his Instrumental Performance Glow Group (7:08)
Adding a text editor web part to the page (1:12)
Working with a large image file by uploading it into Picture Library (1:42)
Inserting an image into a text editor web part (1:01)
Copying the link from the video file in the Document Store (1:04)
Adding the link for a document into the text editor (3:57)
Setting an alert for a discussion board (2:07)
Impact
The following videos are interviews with Alan where he speaks about different aspects of Glow. Although this is early in St Aidan’s High School music department’s use of Glow, Alan is already getting favourable feedback from the pupils about his Glow Group.
Why Alan wanted to use Glow (1:04)
What the pupils use Glow for (0:55)
How the pupils have reacted to using Glow (0:52)
The Discussion Board in Glow (0:54)
You may wish to visit other Cookbooks written about St Aidan’s High School: