One Best Thing: Everyone Can Create Music With iPad Curriculum Guide

For my One Best Thing, I created the Everyone Can Create Music With iPad Curriculum Guide, providing insight into the course I developed at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise. This introductory level course teaches students to use GarageBand on iPad not only to create music and podcasts, but also to learn the fundamentals of music (pitch, rhythm, meter, instrumentation, etc.) along the way. Although the course is designed as an introductory level college course, the curriculum is applicable to high school and advanced middle school levels, perhaps with minimal adaptation. 

In addition to the projects included as part of the Everyone Can Create Music on iPad book developed by Apple, supplemental modules investigate acoustics principles for musicians and audio production hardware and software. Additional course projects investigate One Chord Grooves (thanks for the great resource, Eoin Hughes), Found Sounds (using my Composing With Found Sounds In GarageBand Apple Book), and a Create Your Own Studio project.

The Everyone Can Create Music With iPad Curriculum Guide includes an overview, objectives, activities, helpful tips, vocabulary lists, rubrics, and sample projects for each of the nine modules.

Additional resources such as rubrics, templates, and sample projects can be downloaded by clicking the links and album covers. I hope that the Curriculum Guide will be useful as teachers either: (1) fully replicate the course at their school/institution or (2) pull out individual modules/activities for integration into existing courses. Please share this resource with any teachers who may find this resource beneficial and share any feedback that might enhance its quality.

I would love to receive your feedback on this resource.

  • How might you be able to incorporate modules or activities from the curriculum guide into your courses?
  • Could a similar course be developed at your school?
  • How might the resource be improved?
  • Are there additional activities that could be included to enhance one of the modules?

Please share your thoughts and ideas so that we might initiate a discussion and support each other's teaching and learning. 💡

This resource can be downloaded for free on the Apple Books store here: https://books.apple.com/us/book/everyone-can-create-music-with-ipad-curriculum-guide/id6469569998

3 replies

November 11, 2023

This looks great and packed with resources. I especially love the idea of creating an album cover to go with your music! This would have been perfect for my middle school GarageBand Projects!


November 12, 2023

One of these days I need to dive back into Garage Band. There so many cool things to do with it. You have created some amazing resources for educators to learn Garage Band. Great Job.

November 13, 2023

Thanks so much, Michael! I would love to share some exchange lessons GarageBand (or Logic) for Final Cut Pro. Perhaps a Zoom Unconference session or two? 🤔

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