For the past few years, I have counted down to the new year with a top ten list. I begin on 12/23 and end on 1/1. The list is comprised of 10 tech tools or tips for elementary and middle school general music. This top ten list will have a tech tool or tip featured each day in a short video and blog post. When we reach number one, I will follow it with a video of all ten tools and tips. Therefore, you can follow me daily, or come back on New Year’s Day and catch all ten at once.

WHO AM I?

If you are new to this YouTube channel or my website or my buymeacoffee site, my name is Amy M. Burns and I have been teaching and integrating technology into the elementary music classroom for over 25 years at Far Hills Country Day School, a preschool through grade 8 private school in NJ. For the past two years, I have also worked for Katie Wardrobe in her Midnight Music Community as the Community Coordinator answering questions and giving out tech tips to the community. Finally, I am an author and clinician with four publications. My recent publication titled Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches is published by Oxford University Press and can be purchased from OUP or Amazon today.

Each week on this website and my YouTube channel I post a play-along video, resource video, or a webisode about integrating technology into the music classroom. Please subscribe and click like to the video so that you can get weekly notifications about resources you can immediately use in your classroom. I am also working on my Teachers Pay Teachers page, but currently, it holds many free items. I hope to get that going more in 2023. If you like my resources, please consider buying me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elmusedtech

#6 Canva

Need a one-stop shop to create presentations, play-along video slides, manipulatives, programs, posters, and so much more? Canva for education is it!

From Canva’s Website: “Canva is a web-based digital tool to create and personalize lesson plans, infographics, posters, videos, and more. It is 100% free for teachers and students at eligible schools. You can choose from a library of copyright-free resources, from lesson plans to reports and posters. You can spark engagement with gifs, videos, animations, and music. You can reach and motivate students wherever they are with real-time feedback. Share work as assignments directly through Canva or via your LMS. Students can use Canva to demonstrate learning through different formats — group projects, videos, posters, and more.”

In this webinar, I am going to show you two out of many, numerous ways I use Canva on a daily basis.

Slides for Play-Along Videos (or slides for classroom use)

When I get to number one of this countdown, I am going to show you how some of the free tools in this countdown can be used to create your own play-along videos. This way, you can create ones that match your curriculum, while still using ones that you can find on popular YouTube channels.

When you create a free account in Canva, if your school email address is eligible, you can use the free Canva for Education program that gives you the pro version of Canva for free. If your school is not eligible, you can use the free version which has a lot of images, videos, audio files, and more for you to use. For creating slides for the play-along video, I am going to click on “Create a design”, scroll down to “Education Presentation”, and title it at the top of the screen.

If I wanted to create my own play-along videos, the first item I would look for is rhythms and notes. There is a great place to download free notation graphics and that is from Katie Wardrobe’s Midnight Music (see #6 of this countdown). Through this link, you can download her 2022 updated library which includes notes, boomwhacker notes, stems, and so much more. Or check out #6 in this countdown!

Having access to the “Big Free Music Notation Library COMPLETE 2022” where I know I can click and drag them into Canva, I can now choose pictures that go with the theme of the song, or holiday, or month, etc. The notation will layer over these background pictures. For example, I am creating a “Welcome Back to 2023” play-along using the song, Auld Lang Syne.

A tip: There are many recordings to choose from. I tend to choose ones I can credit on YouTube, purchase on iTunes, or create myself. Usually, a copyrighted song on YouTube will allow it to be used as long as they can run ads off your channel. They will inform you of that. Sometimes, the song is banned in certain countries. You can still use the recording, but not all countries will be able to use your video. Finally, if it is not allowed to be used, your video will be blocked, but it will usually not be a strike against your channel.

I mashed up two versions of the song: Yo-Yo Ma’s version and Learning Guitar’s version. Since I am beginning with Yo-Yo Ma’s version, I am going to look for a video to play over his 50-second rendition so I can create the credits for the video. Once I find a video or two to equal 50 seconds, I will add the title, credit the recordings, and add the musical concepts that will be covered.

I will now find background pictures to place the rhythm patterns on. This song is fairly intuitive with its phrasing of 8 measures per phrase and four phrases in the song. Therefore, the first phrase will be the steady beat rhythm. I work with elementary and beginning with the steady beat helps to set them up to successfully perform the other rhythm patterns. The second phrase will have four eighth notes and two quarter notes. This will set them up for the dotted quarter note followed by the eighth note. The third phrase will be the dotted quarter note, followed by an eighth note, followed by two quarter notes. The final phrase will be a dance break.

For the dance break, I use the bitmoji addon, since Canva can integrate with bitmoji. I look for the dancing ones and add them to each slide. When finished, I will export the video clips as individual mp4 clips. I will then export the picture clips as png files. They will download as a zip file, which I can unzip and upload to a video editing program.

Tidy Up Tool for Programs

I showed this feature in June of 2022. When I wanted to create a recital program, I looked no further than Canva. I placed “programs” in the search tool and found several “Concert Programs” templates appear. The highlight I want to make about the concert programs templates are as follows:

• Many of them have text boxes that are grouped and ready for you to replace with your text.

• If you adapt the template, the format will become unaligned. However, Canva makes it easy to realign the program.

• Highlight the text boxes you want to align. If the boxes are not grouped, I will group them. For example, I would group the following:

• I would adapt with my own text, as well as copy and paste the text boxes to add additional ones.

• Now that the text boxes are unaligned and all over the place, I highlight them, click on “Position”, click on “Tidy Up” and then look at how nicely that looks.

• If I am using a border like in the example above, I would click “Tidy Up” and then align it to the left to make it look nice and clean with the border.

• Now, the program looks clean and I can make last-minute adjustments using the “Tidy Up” function if needed.

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR TECH TOOL OR TIP #4!

Check back tomorrow for tech tool or tip #4!