Category Archives: Music
App Review: Keezy
I recently used an app called Keezy in a storytime I was presenting all about music. The app was originally designed for professional (and aspiring) musicians to use as a sound mixing board, but it has a super-simple interface that makes it into a very flexible tool easy enough for kids to use and full of possibilities for different ways to use it.
The main screen of the app consists of 8 colored squares. When you first open the app, you can touch each square to hear a pre-recorded default recording. Some of the sounds are rhythms, some are synthesized voices singing, others are short musical riffs. You can play them one at a time, or layer them in any way you want, pressing as many as all 8 at once.
You can also choose one of the other pre-recorded musical mixes to hear a different selection of sounds.
But the real beauty of this app comes when you choose the “+” symbol from the options menu.
This option will take you back to the main screen, only this time, there is a small microphone symbol on each square. Press on a square to record your own sound clip and once it’s recorded, the microphone disappears to let you know that that color now has a recording associated with it.
Of course, you can record musical clips (I had my storytime group echo back a few bars I sang to them and then we listened to ourselves on the playback), and one of my favorite features is the fact that there are 8 squares, allowing a full octave of individual notes if that’s what you want, but…. you’re not limited to music. You can record any audio as long as it’s not longer than a few seconds! Some ideas I’ve thought of include:
- Recording animal noises (or your own voice making animal noises) for a guessing game.
- You could incorporate this app into a re-telling of one of those cumulative tales like “Too Much Noise” and record your audience making each of the animal noises before you begin telling the story and just press the button each time when it’s time to hear that noise in the story.
- Same thing for the song, “Bought me a Cat” (of course, the audience can still sing along if they want to!).
- You could do a MadLib story with a group and assign a part-of-speech to each color square (as long as your MadLib has no more than 8 blanks) and ask kids to come up and record a word for each square, then as you’re retelling the story, just press the square to playback the word at the right time.
- You could have kids write an 8-sentence story and record a sentence for each color, but in a scrambled order and challenge a friend to figure out which order the colors should be played in to make the story make the most sense.This is a great, easy-to-use, open-ended content creation app with so many possibilities to explore. Oh, and did I mention? It’s FREE! What will you make with Keezy?
Carissa Christner is a librarian with Madison Public Library.
~*~ Little eLit is a collaborative think tank of professionals thinking about the topic of young children, new media, and libraries. Individuals who share their viewpoints, experiences, and presentations in Little eLit blog posts are expressing their personal views and do not represent Little eLit as a whole.What Apps Do That I Can’t: Responses to Questions from #ala2013, by Angela Reynolds
At our Conversation Starter at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, an attendee posed the question, “What advantages do apps have over other traditional formats?” In response, I’d like to share one really good example from my own experience.
In my Milk & Cookies Storytime, I used the Rosemary Wells app “Bunny Fun: Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” Now, I know the song perfectly well in English, and so do the kids at storytime and all their parents. But I DO NOT know it in French (though some of our patrons did), nor do I know it in Spanish or Japanese (one little girl did know the Japanese! ). But in this storytime, because I had the app projected onto the screen, we learned the words for “head,” “shoulders,” “knees,” “toes,” “eyes,” “ears,” “mouth,” and “nose” in 3 other languages, and tried to sing the song in those languages, too. The kids loved it. The parents loved it. And it only took about 5 minutes total of storytime. Not only was it a language and cultural experience, it was physically active. We were singing and dancing the whole time, and all because of an app. Not the passive, sit and stare at a screen experience AT ALL.
These are the kind of app experiences I am looking for—the ones that add a richness to storytime and model for parents that there are fun learning opportunities on those little devices they are all so fond of. During storytime, I quickly tell the parents the name of the app and where they can find it on the iPads that they can use after storytime, so that they can explore it even more and decide if they want to download it for their own collection. Modeling, sharing fun educational experiences, and helping parents find and use early literacy apps for use at home are some of the great ways we can enrich the lives of the families that willingly step through our doors!
Angela J. Reynolds Youth Services Manager Annapolis Valley Regional LibraryMore Digital Felt Board Songs
These are the felt board songs I did at the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. I usually play the first verse on one of my woodwinds with the image showing, then sing the words, and on the third run through of each song I switch to the lyrics and invite everyone to sing with me. I try to establish a beat or swaying motion before every song. That way I can get people to learn the song through audiation (hearing the song in their head before they begin to sing), feeling it in their bodies, understanding the content of the song visually through the felt board image, hearing the words sung and seeing them written. Everyone sings along by the end, even if they don’t know the words, because this is such an information-rich way to introduce a new tune!
Check out our Digital Felt Board Collection for more ideas!
iStorytime Spotify
Yay! Another tool for the digital storyteller’s toolkit! I’m making storytime playlists on Spotify through my free one month premium trial. I’m hoping to use this as another collaboration/reader’s advisory tool as a part of my Digital Storytelling Project. I foresee children’s librarians in our community libraries developing their own storytime playlists, sharing them with other librarians in the system, or posting what they’re listening to on their individual library’s Facebook pages. There is an issue in that Spotify requires a personal Facebook account to sign in (not a page); as far as the interwebs tell me, there’s no longer a work-around for this. That’ll be next on my list to figure out. Until then, I’m rocking it to Hot Potato on my own account.
Kathy Reid-Naiman Fingerplay App!
Whenever one of my Book Babies parents asks for a recommendation for a good children’s album, I recommend Kathy Reid-Naimon’s A Smooth Road to London Town. This album includes fingerplays, bounces, danceable tunes as well as lullabies, and they all feature Reid-Naiman’s beautiful voice and sophisticated accompaniment. Now you can watch and listen to this expert storyteller on your iPad! Mulberry Media has designed an app for parents, librarians and educators who work with young children.
See a demo of the app here:
I first heard about Reid-Naiman’s music through the Parent Child Mother Goose training program I did at the Vancouver Public Library with Jane Cobb, author of the two amazing storytime resource books (below).
Reid-Naiman, Cobb and other wonderful storytellers partnered to produce this early literacy program for parents and children, and it’s wonderful to see that in addition to the books and music, we can now benefit from their experience through an interactive app! (Review forthcoming!)
App Review: Twinkle Twinkle
Twinkle Twinkle
by Super Simple Learning
for iPhone and iPad
$2.99 from iTunes
Twinkle Twinkle is an app based on the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It includes animated videos of the song (sung by either an adult or a child), an interactive story, and a simple counting game. The story tells of a friendship between a little owl and a star.
This is a sweet song and story combo that’s ideal for young kids, and could be used as a bedtime story or song. The story takes the animation from the videos and adds very simple and subtle interactive elements, e.g. touch the owl and he blinks or flaps his wings; touch the star and it twinkles. The reader navigates through the story with right and left arrow buttons. There’s a home button in the upper left corner, but it can be hard to see on certain pages of the story. The counting game is also very simple – 20 stars appear on the screen and as the child touches each one, it spins, lights up and counts off. There is no way to change the number of stars that appear or change settings to make the game more challenging.
It’s a good introductory app for kids who might get overwhelmed by flashier interactive elements. The focus here is on the song and story so it’s more of a direct analog to a tree book than some other ebook apps, but can help children learn about interactive elements in a very easy and low-key way. I found after a few times through the story my son started ignoring the interactive elements and just clicked through to get to the song, which is his favorite part.
One other minor point of confusion: the animation in the videos and the story is the same, but the story is interactive and the videos are not. The first couple of times watching the video, my son kept touching the owl and the star expecting the same reactions as he saw in the story. Instead, touching the screen brought up the controls for the video player. It took a couple of turns through the app before he figured it out and stopped trying to interact with the videos.
If you want a free preview, check out the Youtube video: