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?

Sing For Your Education

I have long been an advocate of setting things to music to help you remember them. For example, I was never very good at French but can still (just about) sing Alouette and Sur le pont d'Avignon which I was first taught about forty years ago. More recently, I learned the Four Capacities thanks to a song written by one of my students:

Therefore, I was interested to hear on the radio this morning, that children were going to be taught songs to help them memorise "crucial historical facts". To be honest, I'm not sure what constitutes a "crucial" historical fact but more information can be found on the BBC news site and examples are posted on Sing Up's School Trip Singalong page.

No Scottish attractions so far though. Do you have any suggestions of Scottish historical songs that already exist or any you'd like to see written?

British Sign Language

I was looking for some video of people using British Sign Language for Sunday School and YouTube came up trumps.

The first one I looked at was a chap signing to Eleanor Rigby, I think the children's favourite was the sign language singers (however, not sure if this is BSL - can anyone confirm?) but my wife found this one today and it is now officially my favourite:



I am really impressed by the way he signs differently while portraying the different characters. I don't think I would have believed you could impersonate people's voices in sign language before seeing this!

I know YouTube is full of stuff and nonsense and contains some material that is clearly not appropriate in schools but every so often, you come across videos like these and see again its educational potential.

What do you think? Are you inspired to learn a new language or share what you already know?