SoundCloud iPad App For Interpreting Folk Songs

Mrs. Brylski and her AP Human Geography students are discussing Folk and Popular Culture.  SoundCloud provided a great tool to showcase how music exemplifies the differences in the origins of folk and popular culture.  Folk songs tell a story or convey information about daily life.  Students were asked to describe what story their song tells.  Students needed to discover the origin of the song.  They needed to describe the diffusion of the song.  Finally, they needed to decide why it was considered folk and not popular music.

After researching lyrics, origin, and any other information pertaining to the song of their choice, they created a SoundCloud clip which allowed for the song to be heard.  More importantly, they discussed it and interpreted the song as they saw it.

The teacher created one classroom account that all students logged into on the iPad.  After the class completed the work, the teacher changed the password.

The final products were fantastic!

See the process in action:


Here are some individual productions:



In this one, a student SINGS the song.  Amazing how if we let students use their talents, they create amazing products!
Listen to the complete list of interpretations!

Other uses of SoundCloud at PHS.

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Sound Cloud For 1920 Radio Spot

Simply Phenomenal!

Some of the social studies teachers, Mr. Krause, Mrs. McCumber, and Miss Wilcox wanted a tool to help record 1920 radio shows.  Students were to write a script which was derived through research on topics that were presented to the students.

Initially the teachers were going to use Audio Memo to record the radio spots and then upload them to Google Drive.  While the free version allows for recording, it does not allow for uploading to Google Drive.

I suggested SoundCloud as another alternative because I felt that the iPad app was quite user friendly, and I liked how all the radio spots were placed into one website type page.  Teachers created classroom accounts.  Since the free version only allows for 120 minutes of recording, teachers used Gmail accounts to create SoundCloud accounts based on class hours.  After the class hour, teachers changed the passwords to the class accounts.

We were also able to meet standard number 1 of our ITLS standards as it was a new digital creation.

Some fantastic radio spots were created:




View the process, read the details and rubric, hear the teachers talk about how great the process was, and consider using it for your next project.

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