An Activity to Start the Year (and More)!

I will be totally honest - I don't use Keynote a ton. I know it's awesome, but I work in a BYOD district and we use Google so my students and teachers only have access to Keynote when they are using iPads. And for the most part, iPads get used by the littles (and many of those teachers have no idea how to use Keynote).

And then there's Garageband. ACK! I find it intimidating, even though I have used it successfully a few times. I want to get better at it but...time. Life. Other stuff...you get the idea!

But yesterday I went to a workshop on Creativity and I was walked through an awesome activity that I think I can now take back to the students and teachers - it will make a great activity for the start of the year, or for the end of Grade 7 (before the big transition to high school, or for a time when students are looking at the whole issue of "Who Am I?"

Using Keynote, we made a collage that we felt reflected our identity. I brought in pictures I found online as well as pictures I had on my iPad already. I learned how to take the background off of pictures (something your kids are going to want to know how to do, and how to layer things in front of or behind other things.

I feel pretty proud of my collage, but more importantly, I now feel confident enough to teach this process to staff and students. Here's my collage:

 

Once we finished the collage, we moved on to Keynote. The instructions were to use loops to create a short song that we felt went with the collage. I won't explain how to do that here, as my explanation would be completely inadequate! I am still a beginner. However, if you check out the Everyone Can Create Music book, there are instructions there for what to do. And they're easy to follow!

Once I loaded my "song" onto my collage, I saved the Keynote as a movie, which I have attached below.

So, can I replicate this? Yep! Can I teach it to other teachers? Yep...with a little more Garageband practice. Can I teach it to students? See the last answer, but yes!

A few hints....in working with students, I would spend a whole lesson collecting images, taking pictures, etc. Have all of the "bits" of the collage ready before you start teaching how to put it together. If I were doing this lesson with littles, I might create the song together, as a class. Then I could help them layer it onto their collage. If I get a chance to do this activity with real people this year, I'll come back and edit this post with more thoughts and learnings!