Saturday, November 3, 2012

App for That #3: Garage Band

App: GarageBand for iPad

Cost: $4:99 US

Grade Level: grade 5 - beyond, or teacher directed

What it does: GarageBand is a music creating program, that allows you to use their pre-selected instruments, your voice, recorded music and some live instruments to create music and/or podcasts.

How's the App:  This app has a steep learning curve, but once you have played around with it a few times it gets easier.  This is definitely not an app I would have my grade 2 students use independently, but I may have them record their voices on it, and do the editing after school.  As a former pianist, I love that if I want to add a piano sound that I can select a keyboard and the keys respond not only my touch, but also to how hard I press.  If I had used GarageBand a lot prior to getting the app, I am sure it would have been more intuitive to me from the start.  That being said, if you are not afraid of pressing various buttons just to see what they do, then you can figure it out fairly quickly.  Of the music production programs I have seen, GarageBand seems the easiest to understand, and provides samples of various genres and instruments, so that even if you don't read music or play an instrument, you can still create beautiful music.  Incidentally all the podcasts created for my mobile learning course were created with GarageBand.

What it could be used for: This could be used to allow students to create their own podcasts, or for teachers to assist students in doing so.  It could be used in a music production class to create on original or remix a popular song.  If students are creating a video, they could use it to create a song for background to their movie (and I believe that iMovie allows you to drop the song from Garage Band right into its program).

Rating: 4 out of 5

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