This article is written by Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio.

One of my favorite paintings is Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884, housed prominently in the Art Institute of Chicago. It lends itself to endless classroom applications across content areas: art, history, science, creative writing, French foreign language, and literature. You can even work math into this masterpiece, challenging your students to first estimate the number of dots on the roughly ten foot wide by seven foot tall canvas and then figure out how to prove their answers in 15 minutes or less. As a simple activity, early elementary students can count the number of people, boats, and animals (to save you time: there are 48 people).

Bring the Field Trip to You

Google Art Project is an exciting way to bring rich works of art right into your classroom. It started with collections from 17 partner museums around the world and has grown to 151 museums. They photograph works of art in high resolution so the images yield exceptional detail and then post these images in galleries on the website. Just recently, they began adding the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections, including Sunday Afternoon.

Using Google Art Project

Go to the main website, googleartproject.com.

From there, try browsing by collections listed by museum, artist, artwork, peruse other user galleries, or enter a specific search term.

Once you select a painting here’s Sunday Afternoon, a host of options appears by clicking “details” next to the work’s title. There is historic information about the painting, a video to watch, and a map denoting the artist’s location.

Even more exciting, if you click on the little orange and green man icon to the right of “details” you can walk into the gallery on a virtual tour like Google Street View, and explore the actual gallery in which the painting is housed.

Introducing “La Grande Jatte”

Though Google Art Project is an effective tool, I have been using a laminated poster for years for these activities. To get started and peak interest, I hang the poster on the wall or board, and share a few basic details, including the title.

Georges Seurat began painting this in France in 1884. He didn’t finish until 1889. What do you observe about this painting? Come closer if you’d like to see better (or zoom in on the image).

[Possible responses: There’s a monkey on a leash! What is that man doing smoking a pipe? Wow, that lady in front has a big butt. And the one you are looking: It is painted with dots!]

Yes! This painting was painted completely with dots. Does anyone know what that technique is called? Pointillism. Can you imagine painting this whole poster with dots? Well, do you realize that the actual painting was much, much bigger? Then, I mark out a space 10 feet wide by 7 feet tall. How long do you think this would take?

Content Activities

The above is a simple jumping off point, and you can choose your own adventure from here. Is your goal to engage the class in an art lesson? Would you like to include more detail about the history surrounding the painting, impressionism, Seurat’s life, his process of painting?

Here are some ideas on how to tie into content areas using this painting as a catalyst:

History and Geography

Seurat alluded to historic art such as Italian Renaissance frescoes, and Egyptian and Greek sculpture. The painting is set in Paris on the island named La Gran Jatte in the Seine River. There is interesting history about the painting that can be found in books or online.

Science & Color Theory

Seurat was calculated in his use of pointillism. Complimentary colors are key to the vibrancy that he achieved. You can go in-depth into color theory, color mixing, the color wheel, science of light, pigmentation, and much, much more.

Creative Writing

After the short introduction above, continue to engage the students in their observations about the scene. To their earlier point, why does the lady’s derriere look so large? Why are they all dressed up in the park? What are people doing?

Then, the kicker: If you could jump into this painting as a person or object pictured, which would you choose? Start with a class example and choose a character in the painting. Then, ask the class to describe what that person is observing, doing, smelling, tasting, feeling. Write their responses line by line on the board, asking leading questions to get detailed and high-quality responses. When they have 7 to 10 lines, read it back to them and say, “This sounds like a free-verse poem.” Then have each member of the class choose a character, “jump into the painting,” pretend to be the character, and record the character’s observations as a free-verse poem.

Here’s an example of the initial group poem from a class of first and second graders:

Response to “Sunday Afternoon on La Gran Jatte”
(From the point of view of the man with the pipe)

Can people please give me more space?
I wish I had a different day off than everyone else.
All this noise is making me cross.
Children screaming
Babies crying
Monkeys hollering and acting crazy.
I am dreaming of a quiet, lovely park
with children taking naps
so that I could admire nature’s beauty.

Art Project

Before class, cut 8.5” x 11” water color paper (or cardstock) into fourths, one per student. Buy a box of cotton swabs and hand out three per student. Ask each child to lightly sketch a nature scene (if desired give them magazine cut-outs or calendar pages for ideas, or go outside and do plein air sketches). Bring a color wheel and demonstrate the concept of complimentary colors. Let the students experiment with complimentary colors and paint (tempera works well), making dots with their cotton swabs. Once they understand how complimentary colors work, students “paint” their sketch using only dots with their cotton swabs. No strokes allowed!

Depending on your goals, you can go in-depth in any of these content areas, or others of your creation. The point is, there now exists an accessible platform to bring art into your classroom, and there are so many ways of doing so that help you to meet your specific standards goals while broadening your students’ horizons, knowledge of culture, ability to critique and interpret a painting, creativity, and other academic subjects.

Extras

Check out the “education” section of Google Art Project. There are some outstanding activities and challenges for you or your students. The DIY section allows you to create and post your own ideas.

P.S. Though we have these incredible means of opening our students’ worlds to art these days, nothing beats seeing the actual work, in person. If you live in Chicago, see if you can arrange for a field trip. The Art Institute has outstanding teacher resources, including a resource library that you can visit free of charge for access to lesson plans and other resources.

Katie Haydon, founder of Ignite Creative Learning Studio, is a teacher, nationally-known writer and speaker, and a mentor to students of all ages. A life-long learner herself, she loves to find the most creative, innovative, hands-on ways to present math, writing, history, and science to kids. She has taught second grade, Spanish, creative writing, and journalism at Monica Ros, Topa Topa, and Valley Oak Charter schools in Ojai,CA, and creative writing at the Center for Gifted in Chicago. Katie is a published author on teaching, parenting, and early foreign language instruction, and her work was recently featured in Igniting Creativity in Gifted Learners, K-6, edited by Joan Franklin Smutny. A graduate of Northwestern University, Katie majored in Spanish and Latin American language, literature, and culture, and minored in economics. She serves on the Torrance Legacy Creative Writing Awards committee for the National Association for Gifted Children.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Finding Inspiration With Google Reader To efficiently track the sites I’m interested in, I use...

Paper

The iPad app Paper is a beautiful sketching app. It makes my drawings and handwriting look better than in real life. Paper is free, but includes several optional $1.99 upgrades to buy markers, watercolor brushes, and pencils in the app. I purchased one extra, but mostly just use the built-in pen tool.

Let’s Project It!

As soon as I started doodling with Paper, I immediately wanted to use it in class as on the overhead. The problem, of course, is how to get the iPad screen onto my LCD projector.

The answer is a second app called Air Server. This $15 app goes on your Apple Laptop. When it’s running, everything on the iPad’s screen appears on the laptop screen. Hook the laptop up to an LCD projector, and everything on the iPad screen projects onto the overhead screen. This all happens wirelessly, so you can roam freely around the class.

The Caveat

To accomplish this, you need either a second or third generation iPad. Your iPad also has to be on the same WiFi network as your latop, so they can communicate.

If you have the original iPad, you can still buy a VGA adapter and plug directly into your projector, but then you are wired and have less freedom to walk around.

A Stylish Stylus

The final piece to this puzzle is a writing tool. Writing with your finger gets annoying quickly, so might want to buy a stylus. A very popular iPad stylus is the The Cosmonaut. It’s $25 and looks like a huge black crayon. It works beautifully with the Paper app, and makes writing clearer and drawing easier.

• Paper for the iPad
• Air Server for your Mac
• The Cosmonaut

Next on sAppurday

Next sAppurday, we’ll look at a really cool, colorful app put out by a museum in San Francisco.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: sAppurday: Color Uncovered for iPad Color Uncovered is a fascinating app for iPad put out...

Hopefully you’ve tried out Google Reader and are conveniently subscribed to dozens (or hundreds!) of useful sites.

Now let’s check out some apps for iPhone and iPad that integrate the Google Reader experience.

Reeder

Reeder is beautiful, efficient, and integrates smoothly with other services (such as Instapaper, Twitter, and Facebook). Just plug in your Google Account information and it syncs right up.

$4.99 for the iPad app and $2.99 for iPhone. I own both.

This is definitely the most used app on my iPad.

Flipboard

If Reeder is efficient and utilitarian, Flipboard is flashy and visually impressive. Your Google Reader account will transform into what looks like a glossy magazine. My wife, a fashion designer, subscribes to many image-based sites and prefers this app to Reeder.

Free for both iPad and iPhone.

Stay Tuned

Check in next Saturday for another edition of sAppurday at Byrdseed! We’ll be looking at a fun writing and drawing app, as well as checking out how you can get it projected for the whole class to see.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Finding Inspiration With Google Reader To efficiently track the sites I’m interested in, I use...

To efficiently track the sites I like, I use Google Reader. Google Reader, which is completely free, enables you to subscribe to your favorite sites, keeping all sites’ updates in one location. Every time I visit Reader, I immediately see the most recent updates from all of the sites I’m interested in.

If you use Gmail or any other Google products, just head over to reader.google.com and you’ll already be signed up. If not, then it is free to start an account.

What It Looks Like

Here’s a blank Google Reader screen:

And here’s my current Reader’s screen: The left column displays a list of my subscriptions and the large right column displays the most recent updates from all my sites in chronological order, newest first.

Powered By RSS

Google Reader is powered by a technology called RSS, represented by this orange icon, which you might start noticing on your favorite sites:

Examples In The Wild

Sites of all shapes and sized offer RSS subscriptions.

Here is the RSS subscription option on Tamara Fisher’s Unwrapping The Gifted website:

And here it is on Dan Meyer’s website:

The Not Just Child’s Play blog also features RSS subscriptions, although it’s down at the bottom:

And finally, here’s the New York Times RSS subscription page:

Just look for terms like RSS, Feeds, or Subscribe. Nearly all websites – big and small – offer this feature (including Byrdseed)!

Hooking Into Google Reader

After clicking on any of those RSS links, you’ll be wooshed to a page asking you to pick a Feed Reader:

You’ll click on the Google button, and then finally be taken back to Google Reader to confirm your subscription:

The Best Part

Google Reader is convenient and free and lets you efficiently keep up with the web. Best of all, each subscription is commitment-free. If you dislike the site, you’re just two clicks away from unsubscribing. I keep over 100 sites in my feed reader and frequently add and delete.

My favorite feature is the “star” button, which allows you to save favorites for later reading. I often skim through all my updates, starring any which seem interesting, and then go back and peruse these starred items at my leisure.

Google Reader is a constant source of inspiration for my classroom. Definitely try it out.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: sAppurday: Google Reader Edition Hopefully you’ve tried out Google Reader, my favorite source for...

Photo by Robert Scoble

This is a continuation of an earlier article about improving students’ search skills.

Choosing The Best Results

Search engines help us find relevant websites, however the ranking systems do not necessarily return the most reliable pages. This final step requires our human minds to make difficult and fuzzy decisions.

Simply choosing the top result is not enough. We must teach our students to evaluate websites.

Too Complicated

Ever search for advice on teaching students to evaluate websites? You’ll find elaborate pages from Purdue, Cornell, and Berkeley.

These sites use words like “authority, currency, and coverage” or give students a twenty-five item checklist.

I want my students to quickly differentiate between reliable and unreliable sites, and these techniques don’t help.

Let’s approach the problem inductively and rely on our students’ intuition to guide us through this thorny issue.

Round One

A pre-set of rules quickly becomes unwieldily, so instead let’s begin with a set of examples to analyze. Connect a laptop to a projector and start a class discussion.

Go through a set of pages about the same topic, like so:

• A tumblr page about the blue ringed octopus
• A page from Animal Planet about the same topic
• A question on Yahoo Answers about the octopus
• PBS’s page about the blue ringed octopus
• A page from thinkquest.org about the octopus

For each page, ask students how reliable they think the information is. Ask for a “reliability rating” out of four stars. Then ask what specific details influence this reliability? Jot these ideas down.

You’ll probably start to see a pattern emerge. Have students group their common details into categories. These might include:

• visual appearance – sites that appear modern might be more reliable
• author credibility – what information about the author is presented
• prior knowledge – does the information jive with students’ understanding of the topic?
• organization’s credibility – is this website connected with a TV show, book, school, etc?
• ease of editing – can this site be edited by anyone or only experts?

Note that students are essentially creating their own rubric for evaluating website reliability.

Round Two

Here’s another set of pages, which might become a homework assignment or just a second classroom discussion:

• National Geographic’s dwarf planet page
• NASA’s Dwarf Planet
• Yahoo Answers
• Wikipedia’s Pluto article
• A page from Here Be Answers

Ask if the patterns held up for both sets of pages. Refine and revise your class’ ideas.

An Ongoing Exercise

Repeat this discussion throughout the year. You’ll develop patterns and special cases. Write these down as you constantly revise your classroom understanding of website reliability.

Don’t expect these rules to stay static. The web will change dramatically in the next six months, so constantly come back to your “signs of a reliable website.”

The discussion will also tune you into your students’ understanding of the internet, which might be vastly different from your expectations.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Evaluate Using Characters’ Philosophies Up near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is “evaluating.” A...

Symbolism, a mainstay of literature discussion, seems too abstract and ephemeral to teach to younger students. However, with a well-constructed lesson and a plethora of examples, students will quickly get the hang of symbolic representation. We’ll finish this unit up with some great pixel-art and computer work.

Rings

I begin by taking off my wedding band and discussing it with my students. I ask them what it stands for.

Quickly we get some outstanding examples:

• love
• marriage
• my wife
• forever (due to its circular shape)
• the ring finger connects to the vein of love

What if I lost my ring? Does that mean my marriage is gone? Is my love for Mrs. Byrd gone? Of course not! The ring is not actually love.

But many students know that a lost wedding ring could put me in some hot water. So a symbol has strong emotional connections to the idea it symbolizes.

Does a ring always symbolize love?

My favorite counter-example is the Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings. The Ring symbolizes quite the opposite: uncontrollable power. Anyone who obtains the ring becomes consumed by its unquenchable thirst for more power.

Liberty

Next, I display an image of the Statue of Liberty. What does it stand for?

• liberty (duh)
• freedom
• America
• friendship (especially with France)
• hope

Then I ask if anyone has ever seen a movie or image with the statue destroyed or damaged. My 6th graders had tons of examples. We talked about how filmmakers use a damaged Statue of Liberty to show the destruction of liberty and freedom.

I use the classic image from Planet of the Apes to show how the Statue of Liberty symbolizes Earth and its destruction.

Students might also enjoy discussing the symbolism in flags or other national symbols.

The Desert

Symbols do not have to be specific items. A desert is a common symbol, often representing difficulty. When we see a character in the desert, they are possibly going through a hardship or trial.

Bringing It Back To Characters

Throughout the year, we read stories that include symbolism. Hatchet‘s Brian owns a hatchet which symbolizes his hope to survive. Some students said it symbolized man versus nature. Nice!

Some quick symbolism from Pixar movies your students might be familiar with:

• Nemo’s “lucky fin” symbolizes the baraccudda attack that destroyed his family.
• On the bottom of Woody’s boot, Andy’s scrawled name symbolizes their bond and love.
• Mr. Incredible’s room of newspaper clippings represents his longing for another time.

Computer Icons

Our last topic of discussion is the symbols that represent computer programs. We discuss Firefox’s image of the globe surrounding by a fox. Safari is a compass. Keynote is a podium. Garageband is a guitar.

Creation

I explain that we are going to generate similar icons to represent a character. We identify a character’s main traits and their motivation. We think about the dialog, thoughts, and actions that show these traits and motivations.

Then students consider items that share these traits.

At first, students might try to simply draw the character or an object they hold. This is not enough. We want a very abstract symbol.

Consider a simple story such as The Three Little Pigs. The straw pig demonstrates laziness. What other objects show laziness? A straw house is too literal. We want something abstract. A recliner? A bed? A can of soda and some fast food? Now we’re talking!

After students have identified suitable items, I let them start creating their pixel art. We use a small grid. This keeps non-artists in a nice rigid framework, and challenges artists to be creative within the framework. Plus, all kids (and many adults) love pixely artwork because of its connections to video games.

Here is the worksheet (as a PDF) I used to structure this process.

Pixel Art

Naturally, our computers are too locked down to install any cool pixel art programs, so I repurposed Microsoft Excel. Students made square-sized cells and learned to change their background colors, in effect painting with a spreadsheet.

This could be done in the spreadsheet of your choice, including Excel, Numbers, and online with Google Docs.

In fact, here’s an incredible example of collaborative spreadsheet art using Google Docs:

Have fun and let me know how it goes!

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Announcing: Paragraphy I wrote a little utility to randomly order sentences from...

Introducing a new tool to help you click up creative questions: Respondo!

It combines the power of the brainstorming tool SCAMPER with literary elements and an interesting product menu.

Here’s a sample of the power of Respondo!

Substitute The Giver’s setting for A Wrinkle In Time’s setting. Dramatize how this would affect A Wrinkle In Time’s plot. Create a skit.

Check it out here.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Introducing Depth and Complexity The dimensions of depth and complexity are a great first...

Photo by Robert Scoble

I stumbled across the following Wired article and found it very applicable to my own students:

Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. Why Kids Can’t Search from Wired.com.

After reading this article, and seeing my own students type in poorly constructed search terms, I realized that I must explicitly teach search skills to my students.

Starting With Spears

We begin our year with an ancient tools projects. Students build a tool that early humans might have used.

Naturally, many students want to build spears. I use this as a way to explain how Google “thinks.”

No Questions

Many of them “ask” questions like this:

What can I make an ancient spear out of?

Students should not “ask” Google questions, using “who, what, where, when, or how.” I explain that Google matches words to websites, it doesn’t answer questions.

To teach this, I offer ridiculous non-examples, like:

Hello Google. I was wondering, what is the best way to build a spear for my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Byrd?

We discuss that Google will attempt to find pages that include every single word that we typed in. It’s unlikely that a page with all those words will be useful. Instead, students should think about keywords, or the most essential words about a topic.

A well-crafting search query might be:

ancient spears materials

This search will return results containing those three words anywhere on the web-page.

Getting Rid Of Britney

To begin searching, we start with the most simple search term. Let’s type spears into Google.

Guess what comes up?

That’s right, pages and pages about Britney Spears.

We have a laugh. Then we discuss that Google doesn’t actually understand what we type. It just mindlessly matches words to webpages. We have to be very specific in our search terms to get what we want.

I introduce the “–” symbol. Placed before a word, this tells Google to exclude the word. So, spears -britney will locate sites with spears but without britney.

Students now have a tool to make their searches more precise.

Precise Phrases

So now we have the correct spears, but what if we want to be more specific? Maybe we want ancient spears, German spears, or even ancient German spears.

When we use quotes around words, Google searches for the exact phrase.

If you type "ancient spears", including the quotes. the exact phrase ancient spears must appear on a page in order for Google to return it as a result.

Without Quotes

The top three results for ancient spears (without quotes) returns:

• Wikipedia’s Spears article
• Ancient weapons
• Ancient roman spears

With Quotes

Now, when I search for "ancient spears" (with quotes), the top results are:

• Spears used in biblical time
• Ask.com’s Ancient Spears page
• Spears in the ancient world

The differences are subtle, but the quoted results are more precisely about ancient spears, not ancient weapons in general or spears in general.

Britney Ann Spears

Imagine searching for someone named Britney Ann Spears. A regular search would be dominated by the Britney, whereas a quoted search will zero in on the specific Britney that we want.

• Searching Britney Ann Spears returns 177,000,000 results.
• Searching "Britney Ann Spears" returns only 10.

Word Choice and Phrase Length

Based on these tips, you can see how important it is to think of the most specific terms when searching, in order to avoid unhelpful results.

Likewise, eliminating unnecessary terms results in more useful results.

Evaluating Sources

Now that students are giving Google better search terms, the next problem is helping students pick from the sources that Google returns. Look for a future article on how I’m trying to accomplish this with my class.

From The Horse’s Mouth

Head to Google’s search help page for even more help with these tools.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Do Your Assessments Reflect Your Teaching? If we expect gifted students to learn information at a...

Grabbing Screenshots

Every time I present, someone asks how I got the images, so here’s the answer:

1) Download VLC, a free movie player available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

2) Pop a DVD in and open it with VLC.

3) Use Video > Snapshot, from the menu, to save a screenshot.

4) To choose where the snapshots are saved, and how they’re named, use preferences panel.

And that’s it!

Drop these into Powerpoint or Keynote to easily display to a group. Screen shots from movies are great for discussing plot, character, tone, setting, and visual composition.

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Video: Make A Movie Trailer To Analyze Tone Here's part of my technology presentation from CAG 2011. In...

One week before my first classroom opened its doors, I attended a workshop by Rick Morris, who, among dozens of amazing tips, highlighted the ways he uses music to manage his classroom.

Ever since, I’ve used the theme from The Andy Griffith show as a cue for students to return to their seats. These musical transitions have saved my voice years of wear and tear.

Here are some of the ways I’ve been getting music into my classroom.

Smart Playlists

Playlists are a simple idea in iTunes: just drag the songs you want, and they will play in the order you desire.

However, a smart playlist is far more powerful for the classroom. A smart playlist automatically picks all songs that meet certain criteria that you select.

The most useful application in the classroom is that a smart playlist will find songs you haven’t listened to recently and play those first, keeping your classroom music from growing stale.

For example, I have a smart playlist that automatically pulls in all songs in the “classical” genre that do not have a “one star” rating. The smart playlist orders these songs according to “least recently played.” Here’s what it looks like:

These keeps the playlist fresh, since only unplayed songs are at the beginning of my playlist. It automatically includes any song labeled classical, and I can remove songs from the playlist simply by rating them with one star.

I named this playlist “classical” and simply double click it when I need some background music in the classroom.

The best part is, if I download or import a new CD of classical music, those songs are automatically included into this playlist. And these songs will be put first on the list, since they haven’t been played yet.

Here’s a more complicated smart playlist that will automatically include songs that I haven’t listened to in two weeks, have at least four stars, are less than five minutes long, and are no older than 2009. iTunes will pick 25 songs that meet this criteria, and sort them randomly.

Here’s a Lifehacker article on 10 useful smart playlists.

Pandora

Pandora is a streaming service that offers a free plan (with commercials) or a paid plan that is ad-free. Using Pandora, you develop your own radio station by typing in an artist you want to listen to.

Pandora then plays songs that are similar to that artist. You can give feedback by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Pandora then tweaks your radio station based on this feedback.

Anytime you are listening to a song, you can ask Pandora why it picked the song and it will give you the criteria. Here’s why Pandora picked “Man In The Mirror” for me:

Naturally, you can create multiple stations for different occasions. For example I have created everything from a holiday station to a station based on video game theme songs.

The downside to Pandora is that you cannot simply request a certain song or artist. My Michael Jackson station plays songs by Janet Jackson, Jackson 5, Prince, and other artists deemed “similar” by Pandora.

For the holidays, Pandora has been fantastic in the classroom. I just turn on my holiday station and we are treated to a variety of wintery music that I don’t have to spend a dime on.

Want some quiet work music? Create a James Taylor station and enjoy some gentle singer-songwriter tunes.

Pandora is available as a free app for your smartphone and can also be played through the Pandora.com website. Note that using the smartphone app is a great way to get around potential district blocking.

Here’s Pandora’s how-to page.

Rdio

Rdio is a pay service, with a monthly fee. This gets you direct access to almost any song you can think of without needing to actually buy the songs.

For example, I wanted to use the theme from I Love Lucy as students approached the projector to present a sample project. A couple taps on the Rdio app on my phone, and we were listening to this TV classic.

During Halloween, I made liberal use of the themes from Ghostbusters and Thriller, both available through the Rdio app.

As my students developed movie trailers, I quickly brought up the evocative soundtrack from Tron: Legacy as background music while they worked.

Rdio doesn’t have every song or album (The Beatles are notably missing), but there’s an amazing selection that has rarely let me down. For $5 or $10 a month, it offers a great value for people who frequently listen to a variety of music.

It’s also useful for rainy days when students are stuck inside, we can cue several requests during lunch and hear the songs they are interested in (which otherwise I would probably not own).

Again, your district may block streaming sites such as Rdio, but I simply use my phone and plug it into a set of speakers.

Here are Rdio’s frequently asked questions

DIY With Garageband

I had so much success with using The Andy Griffith song as a transition, I decided to find a quick, 45 second math transition. Unable to think of a fitting tune, I opened up Garageband on my laptop and wrote my own!

With a surprisingly loud beginning, a strange low-voice, and an opera-style singing part, it’s the song my students love to hate. They playfully grumble and roll their eyes as it starts up, yet by its conclusion, their homework, notebook, and whiteboard are ready to roll (and sometimes I even catch them dancing in their seat to it!).

Feel free to use this math transition (mp3) in your classroom to get kids ready for a math lesson.

I bet you have a few students who would love the chance to write their own transition songs for your classroom.

So, how do you use music in your classroom, any tech tips for making the most of it?

Thanks for reading Byrdseed.com. Here are some free resources to download.

Related: Google’s 20% In A Gifted Classroom Do you give your gifted students room to explore personal...