YWP Tips Letter 4.9.12-- Upload a song, Exercise on Bullying

Notes from the Underground  

4.9.2012

An ongoing series of Tips Letters -- at minimum once a week -- for users of the YWP Schools Project digital classrooms: Tips, links and a proven exercise to use. 

Q u i c k   T i p s

Wondering if your students are revising their work? Wondering how to see it?  Simply click on the title of their piece and look for the "revisions" tab at the top of the entry.  If there is no revisions tab then the student has not made any revisions. If there is a revisions tab, click on it and you will see a list of revisions made.  Check the box of two drafts you would like to compare and then hit the compare button.  The most recent draft will always be at the bottom of the page.

H o w   D o   I ??

Upload a song ...

First, make sure your song is in MP3 format. If it isn't, one way you can save it as MP3 is to use an inline media converter such as http://media.io/. Simply, upload the song, choose the format you want to convert it to (MP3) and then download to your computer.  

Once you have the file in MP3 format, simply look for the "podcast" heading on your blog entry or exercise. Choose the file you want and hit the upload button. 

And if you want to put the music as "background" to a podcast, use Audacity: Open your narration/podcast in Audacity. Open your music in Audacity. Copy the amount of music you want as background; paste it underneath the narration track. Adjust volume of music by highlighting it, click "effects" and "amplify" (counter-intuitive) and select a negative number. Experiment until you find a volume that complements the narration.

Where do I find some free royalty-free music?

Here are a few links:

• http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
• http://musopen.org/music
• http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/free-music.html
• http://www.mp34u.fm/
• http://sonnyboo.com/music/music.htm
• http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/music.php
• http://archive.org

E x e r c i s e   I d e a s

(cut and paste onto your site)

This exercise courtesy of Stefanie Kingzett at Barre Town Elementary School

1.) Create an exercise.  Choose the correct classroom and then create the tag "Mean".

2) Under the "podcast" header, upload Taylor Swift's song "Mean". Creative Commons version of her song is attached below.

4) In the text box, copy/paste the following:

"A Bully is someone who repeatedly says or does mean things to someone else to the point of making that person feel angry, scared or uncomfortable.

Taylor Swift was often bullied when she was in school. She even wrote a song that made it to #1 called "Mean". This powerful song was her way of getting the message across about bullying-both to bullies themselves and to the victims of bullying.

Please listen to the song by clicking the link. As you listen, be thinking of these three questions:

1. Why do you think kids bully? Have you seen bullying happen to you or someone else?(remember to be discreet-don't disclose names of anyone)

2. What message is Taylor Swift trying to send to the bullies who picked on her? What message is she trying to send to the victims of bullying?

3. What message do you want to send to bullies? What about to victims?

When you are done listening, go to "Create a New Blog Entry" and use the MEAN tag. Then, respond to the song using the three previous questions as a prompt."