Friday, June 11, 2010

Karaoke!

At first thought, Karaoke and education might not seem natural bedfellows but recently I saw someone at a conference taking about TunePrompter - a free program that lets you create your own Karaoke videos. You import a song, find and add lyrics and then, as it plays, tap the spacebar to sync the lyrics to the music.

The chap who talked about this package said that it wasn't hard to see the educational potential of creating karaoke files... so I asked my Twitter network:

Some good suggestions came in, with an extended suggestion from Relativism and another from Catriona_O:
  • Health and Wellbeing (HWB)/ literacy/ Expressive Arts (EXA) rewrite a song as expressive activity relating to relevant topic e.g. HWB 2-08a, Literacy 2-02a, EXA 2-18a. Model lyrics example by creating a whole class song then set group tasks by using an existing song as a base pupils already have a grasp of the music. (Depending on class you may provide small selection.)
  • ikaraoke in any other language surely - is it possible to switch languages?
To answer Katriona's question - you can paste or type whatever lyrics you like, so the choice of language is up to you.

Two great suggestions. Do you have any others you could add?

3 comments:

singtothe said...

I'm surprised this hasn't been raised more. I think Karaoke from an educational standpoint could be advantageous, especially with those who have speech and language difficulties. I'm sure we can all remember learning a melodic song for the alphabet or something similar, so what's the difference?

Unknown said...

Have used a karaoke programme for language teaching - either to record basic phrases which pupils can "read" along to, or to put lyrics to practise structures to a well known tune which class can sing along to.

David said...

Hello singtothe & lmhtob

Thank you for your comments. I suppose it's a bit like the Sesame Street approach to teaching. Songs, and song lyrics stick in your head.