Welcome to Wixie Musical Students, there you go. Good evening. My name is Leanne LaFleur and I'm here with my colleague Pam Wilson.
Pam and I are elementary music specialists for Fairfax County Public Schools in Northern Virginia, and we are here to talk to you about the wonders of teaching using Wixie, teaching general music K-6. So this slide shows my sort of emoji journal, emoji journey through teaching music virtually over the past year. I've been teaching general music for 20 years and prior to last April, I was a proud tech novice.
I have colleagues like Pam who incorporate technology beautifully. That was never me and I was fine with that. I wanted to use music to help kids connect to one another and I figured who needs a computer to do that, right? And then COVID happened and suddenly my computer was the only way to do that.
So that little shocked emoji over on the left there, that was me. And then our music colleagues joined together and they saved me. People like Pam took the rest of us in hand and they introduced us to all these different programs that we could use to engage our kids virtually.
So virtual teaching became fun pretty quickly, but we started to notice that there were three challenges that we all kept consistently bumping up against. So if you look at the slide, digital literacy right away was a huge challenge because we knew our kids needed to continue reading and writing music and we needed to see what they were doing. As of last spring, our kids still had very limited tech abilities, particularly our little ones.
And then we didn't, a lot of us have a lot in place in terms of parent permission. So programs like Flipgrid are great. You can see the kids, you can hear what they're doing, but if you don't have permission from the parents to use it, you can't use it.
So Pam introduced Wixie to our team and that instantly solved all three of those challenges for us. So Wixie is a great tool. It's easy for the kids to use and they don't need special parent permission to use it.
If your school has a license for it, your kids can all use it. So I'm going to go through three projects and show you some ways that I've used Wixie in my class this year. This first one is a tool for melodic practice and I did this with my third graders and they were in October learning about the treble staff, a lot of them for the first time.
So this is a three-page activity that they did to get to know the treble staff. On the first page, they're simply tracing and drawing. So here's an example of a child's finished product.
You can see he traced the treble cleft on the left and then he really loved yellow. So he just kept right on using yellow. The next two he drew on his own.
Here they're just dragging and the goal is to locate the G line. I always put really simplified directions at the top of the slide and then in my clipboard, I include more specific information for what I want them to do. Here's his finished work and I like to use Wixie as formative assessment.
I saw him do this and I noticed a bunch of them looked just a little bit like we needed to spend another minute on the difference between line notes and space notes. You can see this isn't quite a G. And then the very last slide, they had to synthesize everything that we had learned and drag the notes into position. And he nailed that, he's got the scale, he's ready to go.
So I wanted to show you sort of some trial and error hot tips that I learned by creating this activity. One was that the image bank in Wixie is awesome. It has a ton of music stuff and they seem to keep adding to it.
It seems like there's more images in there every time we go in there. But what I didn't find and I didn't really expect to find was these whole notes with the letters inside them. That was sort of a unique thing that I wanted.
So I created those in Smart Notebook and then I used Snagit to take pictures of them and I imported them into my Wixie file that way. So if you can't find what you want in the Wixie image bank, it's really easy to upload your own stuff. Another hot tip, I had a child, we were doing this during a virtual synchronous session and this kid all of a sudden freaked out.
He's like, this is Loeffler, I broke it. And this is what his slide looks like, right? So his C like ate all the other notes. He had deleted half of the notes and the other ones were enormous.
So I started thinking, how do I solve this? So this doesn't happen all the time. And I discovered when you upload an image or you insert an image, Wixie automatically makes them scalable. So you can adjust them, you know, up and down to the size that you want, right? You can turn that off.
If you go to edit within that image, go to properties, see how scale is automatically checked. If you uncheck it, the kids can't adjust the size. And if you protect it, I'm going back up into edit, over to protect, to properties and then protect.
Now they can't delete it. That little red X is gone. So the only thing they can do is drag it.
So edit and properties is your friend when it comes to images. And then the other new thing, this is so cool that you can just now as of like two weeks ago, I think do, you can code the notes and make them play different pitches. So Pam's going to show you a little bit more about this in a minute.
Such a neat tool. So then my second activity was for older kids. This is for fifth and sixth grade.
They got to compose. And it's again, it's a three slide activity. And this first page was just a good conversation starter.
So take lots and lots of cards. Their task was just to put the words with the notes that matched them. This could go here, lots and lots of cards.
It fits better here, lots and lots of cards. Why? So that we had a quick conversation about that. And then right away, I'm able to assess them as they slide those into position.
Page two, they're doing all kinds of stuff. They're creating a word chain. They're simply dragging.
And I told them they could put the notes wherever they wanted. They just came up with a rhythm that they liked. And then they had to add dynamics to it and they had to make a recording.
So these first two steps they're creating, right? But then after they make their recording, I can treat that as a summative assessment because I can tell, are they reading the rhythm the way it's written? Are they reading the dynamics the way that they wrote them? So let's see. There's this is an example of a sixth grade child's work. Love note, lots and lots of cars, bouquet of roses, box of chocolates.
Pretty good, right? So on this one, three hot tips for you that I learned through trial and error. The Sticker Image Bank. I just want to show you where to find this.
This is the part where we keep noticing wonderful music things keep appearing every time we open it. There's something new. So there's a whole folder of instruments.
This Notation Bank would be great for activities like this. So I just wanted to show you where to find that. Cloning is a cool thing.
If you're comfortable with Smart Notebook, you can clone images in Wixie the same way, which I did for this activity because I wanted them to be able to reuse them. So again, you click on the image, edit, properties, uncheck scale so they can't resize it. And then if you go to clone, they can use it as many times as they want to.
And then the other thing that I wanted to show you, I particularly while we're virtual in our county, we still have half of our kids are virtual and half of them are in person on any given day. And anything in my classroom that I would have a poster for, if it's something that I don't think they necessarily have completely committed to memory, I put a resource page in my Wixie activity so that they have that to look at. They're not stressing and maybe not remembering everything right off the bat.
And I discovered in the beginning, I was putting my resource page like before the project that they had to do. And I discovered if you put the resource page at the end, it's much easier for you because then when you go back and you're tabbing through their work, it's not in your way. You just know it's at the end so the kids can access it, but it doesn't bother you.
And then my one final project, and this one is really different than the other two that I did. This was again for sixth grade. And it started off because we were reading We Shall Overcome by Debbie Levy.
And if you haven't read this book with your kids, this is the best introduction to the song We Shall Overcome. So We Shall Overcome is the civil rights movement anthem, right? And the song just puts it into historical context in a way that's really manageable for the kids and really kind of grips them. So then after we read the book, I invited my sixth graders to choose a year and just play with Wixie a little bit and they had to illustrate the importance of the song within that year.
And a lot of my kids had used Wixie like years ago. They had a second grade teacher. My kids were sixth graders now, had a second grade teacher that was really into Wixie.
But when I mentioned using it for the first time in years, they were kind of like, we did that when we were little, really? So it was a neat chance for them to get to see all the things that Wixie can do that they had no idea Wixie could do from years ago. So their guidelines that I gave them, I told them things they had to do. And in our system we do a three is you've met the expectation and four is you've gone above and beyond.
So for a three, I said you have to change the background color. You have to include the year that you're focusing on, include some keywords, include a picture, and make a voiceover recording. And then if you wanted to go above and beyond for a four, you could include more background pictures and you could insert a video.
So I had one child who asked if he could do like the title page for the project. So he found these image blocks in the alphabet blocks in the image bank in Wixie and he figured out how to move them around and roll them over. And then he sings.
That was our introduction. And then, you know, I love it. These guys did the year 1962 and they experimented.
That's my don't step on Pam's time timer. I'm almost done. They experimented with downloading images from Google.
That was a little bit of a challenge. So I hadn't told them how to do that. They figured out how to save it to their hard drive and upload them back into Wixie.
That's where these two photos came from. And then this one I think is in the pics for learning image bank. They added a lyrics video because they wanted music in the background.
And then they talked about 1962. And then we had another group that asked if they could do 2020 as their year. So they also inserted a video.
She is also America's first African-American and first Asian American vice president. You can hear from that last the 2020 presentation. You can hear that the voice has changed.
We actually used the Teams feature in Wixie for the first time when we did this activity. And using Teams allowed them at this point, we were completely virtual. One of the kids was in Wyoming and one was in Florida and it let them collaborate.
And it also was fun to see them teaching each other. They were kind of troubleshooting actually how to use Wixie as they were doing this since a lot of the features were newer to them. So at the very beginning of my session, I talked about how I always want to use music to build community.
And I've realized over the course of doing this, this is just another way to build community. So even when we're back to normal and we get to sing and dance and play instruments again, I'm still going to use all this stuff because it's a way of building community that I never even thought of before. So here is my contact information if you want to reach out and if you have any questions later on, there's two L's.
It's cllifler at fcps.edu. And I'm going to stop sharing my screen and give you over to Pam Wilson, our county Wixie extraordinaire. Well, the most amazing thing. Thank you, Leanne.
That was amazing. The best thing about working in Fairfax County, I think, is the amazing teams that we have and the collaboration that we have as a community. And I think that that's one of the most amazing things that we can do.
We have a Facebook page. We have a Google Drive that we share. We talk with each other all the time and help each other so much.
And I'll take a step back about my own journey with Wixie. A couple of years ago, I went to a conference and I saw another program being demonstrated and I was like, that's all the things I want to do because I'm kind of the music center extraordinaire maven in my district. I do some classes.
I know a couple of people have taken that class in this group. But I wanted to be able to hold the kids accountable for what it was that they did. So if they had a manipulative and they created something, there was no way for me to capture it unless I was sitting there right there with them.
And so I wanted them to be able to take some sort of a device and take a picture of it and then record themselves either doing the rhythm or singing the song or telling me about whatever it was that they did. And so I went to my tech person and she said, oh, you need to do Wixie. Well, I started using Wixie and this was a few years ago and I just couldn't get it.
And I went away and like Leanne this year, I was like, I am going to figure this out. And so our journey with Wixie really began anew last spring when we went completely virtual. At my school, we had no live sessions with the kids at all.
It was all asynchronous. And so my first thing that I did was a Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit, and I had them write their own words. Well, about four kids did it because like Leanne, my kids did not, my younger kids did not have the technology skills.
So I'm also going to share with you a couple of different projects that I've done. And my school only has Wixie for K to five. And so far this year, I've only used it in first, second and third grade.
So that's what I've done this year. And they're getting pretty good at it. I keep trying to convince my first, second and third grade teachers.
My third grader teachers are now using it in their classroom, which is good. So my first thing I wanted to do is check for skills in rhythm reading. So we this is what we started with at the beginning of the year.
And it's a lesson that I have done many years in reading the Muffin Man. And this is a first grade lesson. So they're learning about sound and silence.
And so there were several different rhythms that I created that had the Muffin Man. And so they would they would learn to click the microphone tool and record themselves reading the rhythm. Then on the last slide, I said, whoops, we ran out of muffins.
You have to create your own. And so they were to go and get the paintbrush tool and create their own rhythm using stick notation. And that turned out really, really great.
I absolutely loved it. And again, they read they recorded their voices and recorded their. And I'm just realized I didn't put an actual recording of the children, but they recorded their voices and their little sweet voices were able to say their rhythms.
Now, another project that I have is likely and I like using literature, if possible, in my classes. And a couple of years ago, again, I went to an orphan, an orphan conference or an orphan class, and they taught a class using the book, The Red Knit Cap Girl. And what we do is we take all the characters from within this book.
And this is by Nyoko Stoop. We take all the characters in the book and we figure out what are the rhythms for the characters. And one of the things we're trying to have some kind of rhythm vocabulary, the two beat rhythm vocabulary.
So as they go through, they need to go in. And we have cloned we've said I've set up all of these different rhythms on the top as clones and they need to drag them down and match whatever it is that they're doing. Now, the fun thing that I wanted to tell you about is that and I'll show it to you once we're done with the whole presentation here, is that you can use something called demo mode to demonstrate it for your students.
So if you wanted to show it to them in front of your class before you jump into the actual slide presentation, there's three little dots. And again, I'll show that to you when we're done and you can you can show the demo mode so that it won't mess it up. So again, we practice clapping it red cap girl and we'd figure out how many sounds are in that.
And then we would drag the notes down so that it would go with that particular one. And again, I can assess are they able to match it. Now afterwards, I put different versions in a showcase and then showed it to the class and we kind of corrected each other's work, which was a very helpful learning experience for them because they got to see, oh, that one doesn't quite match.
And they got to hear, oh, that matches and this doesn't. So with those exemplars, we were able to work as a group and then then later the kids could go back and fix whatever it was that they hadn't gotten quite right and come back and turn it back in for me. All right.
And then this this was also our unit on melody. So I asked them to to drag either a high sound and a low sound and by that we mean so and me. It's just two notes.
And so they got to drag down their own rhythms so that they could create a melody. And then again, once they created their melody, they would click on the microphone and sing that melody for me. So that's pretty cool being able to do that.
Now with my second graders, this works great, but my first graders are kind of pre literacy. I follow more of the John Fire Robin and I don't really go into the notes until second grade. So my first grade, instead of using the notes, I had them use just the characters, which basically is the same literacy.
It's just not using the notes. So they would put one of these boxes and they did get a little confused about the boxes. They wanted to fill in all eight of the boxes.
I tried to make that clear to them. The only one, only one. And so they could again sing their sing their tune.
And if they decided they didn't want maybe spiky hedgehog, they didn't want they wanted to put moon in there somewhere. I decided not to protect it. Although Leanne, I'm realizing I didn't turn off the scaling.
Oh no. So we would go up to edit. And go into properties and turn off that scaling.
I just realized I didn't do that. Leanne was our, was the one who found that scaling trick and that's been amazing to help with so many different things. Alrighty, so listening, responding to listening is another thing that we wanted the kids to do.
Right now we're doing, we're just finishing up or just finished up a unit on composers and we wanted the kids to be able to draw a picture to their composers. Well, if they're in person and you're in person, they can draw a picture and turn it into you. Unfortunately, some of the kids are still virtual.
So in order for you to be able to see the picture, how do you do that? Well, I figured out that if you wanted to have them play music in the Wixie, you would simply insert a YouTube video, which is a lot of the way that we're playing music in our Google Slides now as well. So what I did was when you, when you go to video, there I am, you just click on YouTube and paste in the URL right there. So I have the, I have the window open with this particular video and copied, I've copied the URL and then when I paste it in there and click add, in comes the video.
That's all there is to it. Now I wanted to, I wanted to make sure that that video was really easy to play because my little guys wouldn't necessarily know to go over there and click play. And so I found that if I go to edit and I go to properties and I lock it, all of a sudden it, all I have to do to play it is just click on it.
And the kids know very well how to do a play and how to do a stop on the video. And that is the simplest thing ever. So now we can use this.
And of course I used a background, I chose a background picture from the, from all of the beautiful backgrounds. I just searched for ocean. And there it was, that beautiful background picture for my ocean.
So I was able to create that background and now the kids can come in and do that. Now I haven't done this particular lesson yet. I am very excited to try this this spring.
That's a new one for me, but I'm super excited because we were trying to problem solve about how do you get them to listen to that music because when you insert, it's not yet very clear about, you can't just insert an audio file. So inserting a video is a way to do it. And we just choose the ones where it has a video with just the composer's name.
So this is my contact information, pswilson1 at fcps.edu. So if you have any questions or you want to, you know, share any of your great ideas, I would love to hear them as well. But we have some bonus content before we leave because we believe in bonus content. We have been so excited about some of the new cool stuff that has come out just recently.
So I want to show you some of the cool stuff. And I am super excited that Sarah Robles is actually here today. Yay, Sarah Robles, who was our pioneer with the coding part of the notes that Leanne was referring to earlier.
So I'm going to turn off my microphone and I'm going to play a little bit of Sarah right here. Hey, everyone. Today, I'm going to show you really quickly how to do some basic music coding in Wixie.
So I find it helpful to have two tabs open. And in the first tab, you're going to want to go to templates and music. And then right here, this first coding music cheat sheet.
And this gives you the directions and the letters and numbers that you need for this process. In the second tab, I'm going to start a new project. And I'm just going to click on image, music, notation.
And I'm going to grab a quarter note. And also a pair of eighth notes. So the text to talk feature just tells you the name of what the image is.
So I click this quarter note. Eighth note. But what we're going to do is we're going to click on edit, edit alt text and change it from saying quarter note to saying we're playing a tone.
So we're going to put bracket, tone, colon. And if you go back to your cheat sheet, C4 is middle C1 is a quarter note. So that's what I'm going to put.
C4, 1, end bracket. The brackets and the colon are really important. So don't forget them.
And then I'm going to do the same over here for the eighth notes. Edit, edit alt text, bracket, tone, colon, C4. And this time we're going to do 0.5 for the eighth note.
0.5, comma, to make a second tone, C4, 0.5, end bracket. And now when I click the yellow button, now, personally, I find this too fast. If you want to change the duration, again, all you go to is edit, edit alt text and you can change it from a 0.5. I prefer a 1 just because it's a little longer and it's easier for my younger students to understand.
And so if I'm making that longer, I'm going to make the quarter note longer. I'm going to make it a two. And now.
And that's how you can do some basic coding of music in Wixie. Amazing. Yay.
All right. I'm going to jump out of this and show you just like where all of that stuff is. One of the most exciting things that, Scott, you made our whole year when you showed us some of the new templates that have come out.
So if you go into the templates folder, you can go into now a music folder, which has been lovely. And all of these fun little things that are in here. This is the trouble stuff that Leanne used in her first project.
But get out of town. We now have percussion tubes, otherwise known as boom whackers. What? And they've made it chromatic so you can really do any key that you would like to do.
I showed this to my third graders and they just about lost it when I showed them that they could play hot cross buns with these tubes. They were like, what? What is happening? And I said, I will push it out to you right now. I shared the link and they were so excited, so excited.
So hot cross buns. And as our third graders are learning to read notes, they're now, they're also, you can also ask them, why is the B shorter than the G? And that is that lovely science of sound that we all learn about. I am very excited in our district that we now have a folder.
That's something that in your district you can ask your central office people to set up that folder for you. So we now have a general music folder here where we can send the link. We can hit there's a share.
I'll show you that in just a moment. And we've got primary and upper is the way that we set it up. I also have a music folder within my school, which is nice because I have a colleague teacher and so we can put things in there that we expect to use quite a bit.
There's my Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit lesson that I did last year. This is a chance for them to get to know a little bit about Wixie just to practice some things. And then this is a beautiful lesson that one of our colleagues shared with me and I've used it with my third grade and they absolutely love it where they get to create their own sentence for the EGBDF of the lines in the spaces and FAC for the spaces.
So really, really fun things. I'm so excited about this program. I think that it really opens up so many different things for us in the general music classroom.
And I think that is all I have for today. I'm going to stop presenting and pass it back to our lovely hostess, Danielle. All right.
Well, thank you so much. That was really, really great. I enjoyed it a lot.
As Lindy said, this was one of her ideas at 2 a.m. in the morning when she couldn't sleep and we were all very excited when we saw it happen. So thank you, especially sharing about that coding part and the video tips. Those were really great.
The coding was definitely something that I needed. It was a big aha moment. So thank you.
Thank you. It was great.
