Over the half term break I attended an Apple Workshop on how to use Apple GarageBand on the iPad. It was incredible (and free).

My goal was to gain the skills to role out an ‘iPad based’ music curriculum for the pupils in the SEMH provision I run. This is inline with my approach to use tech to empower children to create and build self esteem. I have previously spoke about that here.

I have now had time to play with GarageBand, and create my own songs – it is an extremely powerful, fun and intuitive piece of software, that is free and comes pre-installed on all iPhones, iPads and Apple Macs.

I have made a few videos documenting what I have learnt.

First here is the video I wished I would have been able to watch prior to attending the Apple Workshop – my hope is that it will allow anyone that is brand new to GarageBand to make a song in a few minutes.

Phase 1 is to support the children to make their own songs and then build a collection of GarageBand iPad Lesson Plans to share. The next phase will be to see if they can use these songs in there own movie – my (maybe unattainable) goal is to develop ‘digital’ story creation to go alongside our Story Telling Schools approach to literacy, where pupils can plan there own recycled/original story, then film (on iPads), edit (again on iPads using iMovie – another free Apple App), and also compose their own accompanying sound track / music.

Here is an example I made over the holidays, a very short movie about cutting the grass, where each part of the story, the problem, solution and end, has a different part of ordinal music I made in GarageBand. Including cutting the grass this took around 2 hours to make.

Please reach out and share if you make anything with either GarageBand or iMovie (or a combination of both) I am always excited to see what others create or if you want to discuss in more detail.

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