Posts Tagged: SLS

#Success / Teaching — 1 Comment
25
Jul 11

SLS–Live Performance

This is the second guest post from Debbie Wesson, on our Same Language Subtitles project.

Student PreparingPrepared and delivered a lesson using KaraokeParty.com as a vehicle to improve reading levels to a Year 7 group. Firstly I gave them a copy of the lyrics and we went through together highlighting any words they were unfamiliar with and had a discussion on what they thought the song was portraying. The next step was to identify poetic devices, e.g. alliteration, similes, rhyming.

Student Preparing_BoysThis then lead onto singing the song. As this was a mixed group, the students decided that the girls would verse the boys. The students engaged with this process because they liked the thought of the competition. Once the girls had sung their score was written on the board and the boys had to beat it. Once the students had sung the group wanted the teachers to join in, as they felt confident they could beat them.

Student Preparing_SingThe whole activity was a great success as everybody engaged and felt confident to get up and have a go. This could be because they had familiarised themselves with the words and made a connection with the song. The students were also keen to improve their score and were eager to have another chance to sing.

I am sure you will agree, Debbie has done a wonderful job engaging with her students.

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Teaching — 3 Comments
6
Jul 11

SLS with our Support Team

I would like to thanks the Learning Support team who are helping me introduce our students to SLS and Karaoke Party to help develop their reading and language skills. In particular, I would like to Debbie Wesson who has been driving the agenda within her team following our meeting last week.

I am very proud to present her first blog post on SLS from within Learning Support.

Met with K Still on 30/6/2011 to discuss SLS (same language subtitles), which resulted in a very productive afternoon.

Firstly we accessed the Karaoke Party website to view songs available. Kristian had already researched various sites but this one appeared to benefit the students the most as results on performance were available. It was then decided to surf the web to determine if there were any web sites available to supply lyrics for the song, in order to determine the suitability of the words.

We discovered a website azlyrics which had most of the lyrics, from the songs available on Party Karaoke.

Our next line of thought was towards the need to assess the reading criteria, to ascertain the reading age of the lyrics. Therefore, being able to establish the correct provision for the students and to monitor any progress made.

After researching a few sites we located juicystudio, which indicated the reading age using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

This appears to be an exciting and interesting intervention programme, which the students should be able to engage in, with the advantage of being available at home.

We also deliberated regarding the learning potential with regard to promoting their reading skills and the progression to spelling, meaning of words, extension of vocabulary and synonyms.

I hope to be able to report Debbie’s successes and reflections in the coming weeks.

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Teaching — No Comments
17
May 11

Karaoke Party Microphones

This week we tested our ‘budget’ microphones for use with KaraokeParty.com on staff laptops.  With most laptops having in built microphones these days, there is a need to modify the settings.

With the level settings adjusted the input was fine, albeit my vocal ability limited.

Out testing certainly caught the attention of the students in the room and an impromptu and short student testing phase followed. Their enthusiasm was encouraging and interesting. A paired singing model seemed most popular with the on-lookers often reading / mouth / or singing along.

KaraokeParty

Sadly, KaraokeParty did not see enough business potential n the project to support us. Maybe, when we have shown  an educational advantage to reading they might consider a support package for schools then? In the meantime we will probably purchase a years STAR account to enable party mode and a wider range of songs to select from.

Hi,
Feel free to use our service for educational purpose. However, we don’t sponsor any activities with Star accounts but there are a lot of songs available not requiring Star.
Best regards,
Karaokeparty.com

Who, When and Benchmarks

We have a few tasks left to complete.

Now we need to identify the students that we feel would benefit and enjoy the sessions.

Identify the sessions, we two groups. One small 1:6 / 1:8 bespoke groups and one class group. However, we still need to think through how the class sessions will be delivered.

We need to determine benchmark reading ages for students in order to measure the impact of the intervention and what measure we will use.

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#Fail / #Success / e-Tools / Teaching — No Comments
18
Apr 11

Hold the Press

I was just about to bring my SLS project search to an end for today when I found Karaokeparty. Its an online, scoring, battleing, recording Karaoke platform. The basic account is FREE and powered by ads but there is also a subscription service. What do you want to sing? Also means, what do lyrics do you needs to read to improve your score.

Kparty

The things I do for teaching…. I annihilated ‘More than Words’ only to then butcher Katy Perry’s ‘Firework.’ and then managed a mere 4508 points, a lowly 475th TODAY for Bruno Mars ‘Just the Way You Are.’ C’on, there were only 10,318 better attempts this month!

The website is easy to access and comes with all the features you would expect from a modern social network. Given the Karaoke spin, you have the chance to battles other singers, record your own tracks and of course measure your performance statistics. I wonder if this is my route into reading using Same Language Subtitles?

Maybe…. just maybe we can host a party using their Partmode to celebrate the students reading improvements?

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English / Teaching — No Comments
18
Apr 11

SLS Videos

So, I am pursuing the Same Language Subtitles project with a little more determination and I have aside just an hour or two to trial the Karaoke editing / creation tools and webware.

tuneprompterFirst a thank you to CeriWilliams who suggested Tuneprompter. A relatively basic but straight forward editor which does require access to iTunes BTW. Simply open your audio file / song, type in your lyrics (an opportunity to increase the demands placed on literacy later on into the project) and then tap the spacebar along with the music to create the Karaoke effect. Export the video straight into iTunes if you like (and therefore ipod, iphone or ipad) and voilà – done. Connect an iKaraoke microphone to your idevice and you’re on. iKaraoke removes the vocals from your video, allowing you to karaoke anytime, and anywhere.

karafun_studioKarafun Studio is definitely a more comprehensive Karaoke editing package.  The results from the trial were pretty decent and I can only describe it as easly Windows Movie Maker, meets PhotoStory meets Karaoke. It would have been a lot easier if the help links were broken, so do use this one. A Standard Single-User License is £35 so its a reasonable fee for a bespoke tool.

 

cantandingCantanding is basically Karaoke Youtube search engine. Simple to use and quick to access however

 

 

 

 

Finally Ultra star deluxe – an Open Source karaoke game with gameplay similar to that of commercial product SingStar™. On the upside, there are a number of artist who have donated song titles and UltraStar Deluxe does allows users to create their own songs. On the downside, its far more complex, in addition to the lyrics, the notes and pitch values are required to fulfil the gameplay style of the product. Sadly, beyond the scope of this pilot.

I think for ease and speed, TunePrompter gets the nod over Karafun, after all the aim is to improve reading skills rather than ICT proficiency.

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