NextGen Digital Dance Classroom

The projects for my large PBL with Music and Media students and cross-curricular connections with Chemistry are finished! I am so excited to unveil the final products!Watch our post-edit trailer for a sneak preview of what you are about to read! Here is a recap from a previous post with new updates at the end:  I met separately with the Music & Media teacher, Cayla Cardiff, as well as with Chemistry teacher Lisa Ivy, to prepare details for the project and prepared all of the documents and folders needed in Google. Special apps were loaded specifically for this class. Let me introduce to you: Elements in Music and Motion. Day 1-Music & Media students and Jazz 4 dancers met on Monday in the dance studio to hear about the big project reveal. Step 1: Pair 1 Jazz 4 dancer with 2-3 Music & Media students. Step 2: Use Name Selector to assign each group to a chosen element from the Periodic Table. Step 3: Have Jazz students access a collaborative folder th

...and all through the our dance house,  not an iPad was sleeping and no need for a mouse. The projects got going, we were grinding our gears,  in hopes that winder break soon would be here.  The apps were all loaded and kids asked with mocking dread "Mrs. Searles, what goes on in your head?!" Well, hello again! It has been awhile. I apologize for such late December posts as I have been posting weekly the whole 1st semester, however, these 2 weeks in December have gone by with such intensity that even the weekend would pass by before I had any chance to share! So I am going to break these posts up into 3 separate ones. This 1st post will recap continued daily integration as well as a few new new things and  highlight Dance & Media projects. My other 2 posts will recap the 2 projects that my students did for the end of the year. We continued to have the iPads as daily integration in our courses as we prepare for my 1st ever dance spelling test! Awwapp.com c

We only have 2 weeks of school between Thanksgiving break and final exams which only gives us 5 class days. I had 1 day of NextGen training and needed 1 day for exam review, end of semester "clean-up" and time to present final project. Which gave us the perfect magic number of 3 days for a end-of-semester projects. Ballet 1-3 was studying The Nutcracker, Ballet 4 was studying Swan Lake, and Dance 1 & 2 were both wrapping up their ballet units. So I took one project idea and modified and differentiated for all 4 classes. Check it out.... BALLET HISTORICAL PICTORIAL Dancers were assigned both a partner and topic. Ballet 4 had original dancers, choreographers, and composers of Swan Lake. Ballet 1-3 had original dancers, choreographers, and composers of Nutcracker as well as plot summary, characters, adaptations of the ballet. Dance 1 & 2 were assigned historical dancers that have or are currently making historical contributions to the world of ballet as dancers, chor

Each year during the 3rd Six Weeks, my ballet classes study classical ballet repertoire, most commonly the Nutcracker. We learn the story line, history, and a dance to one of the classical characters of the ballet. In years past, I borrow the children's book from my daughters bookshelf and we sit around and read it together. This year, I wondered if I could be lucky enough to find something digital to use. There are filmed readings on YouTube, apps called Nutcracker-Ballet School Stories, Nutcracker-Bedtime Story for Children, Sound Books-The Nutcracker, and The Nutcracker-Musical Storybook ($2.99) as well Nutcracker story games. Wonder about the original book behind the story line written for the Nutcracker Ballet? There's an app for that too. (Nutcracker and the Mouse King) Ballet 4 is doing the same lesson with Swan Lake. There is Sound Books-Swan Lake, The Swan Lake ($0.99), Swan Lake-Bedtime Fairy Tale ($4.99). We also used Youtube for both classes to watch one versio

It has been both a frustrating and great week for NextGen Dance. I was challenged this week with projector troubles. Our projector was moved in hope for the ability to finally use the Mimio board. However, the projector did not like it's new home and has put up quite the tantrum turning on and off on it's own all day long, sometimes multiple times within a minute. But what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. As a teacher, you have to make the choices of when to push ahead, move on, change channels, or give up. We pushed ahead with lessons, but I had to brush up on my wipeboard skills and rolled an old projector cart into my class. I am so blessed with all of this technology, but it is hard to choose "push ahead" instead of "give up" when you are a classroom that is expected to be using it and you spend so much extra time planning your lessons around it. Nevertheless, we still had great things coming through the adversity! Dance 2 continued their ball

Ours shows and post-show wrap ups are over and it's back to life as we we know it...full speed ahead! My ballet classes are returning to their vocabulary, but this time in a new way. We are taking the vocabulary from our 1st 6 weeks and working on the job-worthy skill of spelling. They are great at saying them, translating them, and demonstrating them...but spelling, turns out it is a struggle. What happens if they apply for a dance job or start teaching dance themselves? So after our journals in Google Classroom, we open up awwapp.com and and take a handful of terms at a time. I dictate and they try to spell. Then we review and display the correct spelling including the French accents. Each day we will add more words to our list. Our goal at the end of the weeks is to take a spelling test on Classkick with the vocab prerecorded and loaded. Both levels of ballet also worked on their PIE Grant "Fit & Flexible Minds & Bodies," with Ballet 4 using Yoga apps