Posts made in September 23rd, 2009

Making Music with the Myna Sound Editor

Posted on Sep 23, 2009 in Activity Ideas, Resources, Software, Useful Links | 1 comment

I’ve written about Aviary before. If you haven’t seen it, Aviary provides a suite of online tools that allows you to take screengrabs and edit / host images. For free.

Twitter has been buzzing this week with talk of their latest addition to their application suite. They’ve called it Myna, and this time they are entering the world of music and audio editing.

Again, the application runs in a browser window – so nothing needs to be installed on your computer. Just visit the Aviary website, click on Audio Editor and off you go.

The software allows for multi-track editing. A wide range of audio loops are provided in different musical styles from Rock to Electronica.

In addition you can import your own sound files and also record your own straight into the application.

Using Myna, it would be very simple to produce your own Podcasts or music mixes, much in the same way that you could with Audacity or Garageband.

Once saved – you can “Mixdown” your creation and share it with others via the Aviary site. This would be a good way of hosting your podcasts, which can sometimes be tricky. Aviary provides a link to the hosting page, or you can use an embed code to put it into your blog/VLE.

Like this:

Myna is free, but you can upgrade to a pro account for $25 or so.

I’m very impressed so far. And will be interested to see how many people make use of this instead of something like Audacity. I do like the free music samples which can give students a very quick startup time if you just want them to look at how to mix different tracks together.

Here’s a quick guide that Aviary put together to demonstrate Myna:

Myna is well worth checking out. And the rest of the Aviary suite too. Go take a look now! http://aviary.com/

What happens when you give children an iPod Touch?

Posted on Sep 23, 2009 in Hardware, Useful Links | 0 comments

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Leon Cych at Teachmeet SUKE last week, and he was telling us about the great things he’d seen when a class of kids were given an iPod Touch each.

Here’s his video which shows more:

You can view the video at Blip.tv here. The movie was filmed at Burnt Oak Junior School, Bexley, Kent.

The class have been using a class set of iPod touches for a couple of weeks. The video interviews the class teacher, headteacher, and students about the experience.

What comes across is hoe motivated the students are when using the iPod touches and how quickly they adapt to the new technology and focus on learning rather than playing. You can read more about the project at Leon’s Learn 4 Life blog.

Digital Oscilloscope from Aartpack

Posted on Sep 23, 2009 in Activity Ideas, Science Resources | 3 comments

Here‘s a nice simple resource that could be used to teach Sound and Waves in Science. There are several sites that show oscilloscope traces when looking at sounds, and this is another one. It’s produced by Aartpack, and they call it a Digital Theramin – named after the staple musical instrument of 50s sci fi movies (wikipedia info)

What I like about this one is its simplicity. Plus it would work well on an interactive whiteboard to show how the shape of the sound “wave” changes as the pitch and volume changes.

Click the Menu button to show the options, and set it so that the Sine Waveform is set to a value, and the other 3 are turned off (no scale), like this:

Then if you click anywhere on the screen, a sine wave will be drawn and a note will be played (turn up your speakers!)

If you drag your finger/pen to the right the note will get higher and the waves will get closer together. Likewise drag your finger/pen to the left and the pitch will get lower.

If you drag up the screen the note will get louder, drag it down the screen and the note will get quieter. The amplitude of the sine wave will reduce.

This would be very nice to demonstrate sound waves at KS2 or Ks3.

The only drawback is that there is no way to set it up so it works without having to touch the board. I’d like to have seen a mode where you could place a button on the screen, and move that button up/down left/right to change the note. That way you could let go of the board to address the class and keep the note playing/displayed. I’m pleased to see it will resize to full-screen so you can make the resource fit the entire whiteboard.

There are more complicated settings that you can play with if you want to do some more advanced stuff, but the sine wave feature alone makes it a very handy bookmark to have for your Sound lesson! You can access the digital theramin/oscilloscope here.

There are other interactive resources on the Aartpack website too. It’s worth looking around the whole site to see what they have for your subject.