Guest author: Elisa Jones
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Welcome to another blog post written by a guest author. The author of today’s article is Elisa Jones. In this article, Elisa Jones shares 5 Ways to Use PowerPoint to Make Singing Rehearsals More Effective.
– Katie Argyle
5 ways to use Powerpoint to make your singing rehearsals more effective
If you think about it, every class session is a presentation. So why not use a presentation tool to make learning more effective for your students? Here are 5 ways you can do so.
1. Associate Emotional Images with Lyrics
Everyone knows the power of imagery. Use it to your advantage by creating a PowerPoint for a song and applying an image to important lines or phrases.
This will help your students, especially the more visually-oriented ones, not only remember the lyrics better, but to be able to associate it with an emotion. The more emotional the image, the better! Here are some examples: a verse from ‘God Bless the USA’, and one from a mix of songs from the 1970’s.
2. Teach the Form and Style of the Song
If a student understands where the repetition happens in a song- either in phrase or lyrics- they can far more easily chunk the piece down and learn it quickly. A PowerPoint is a great way to show your students the form and even the mood or texture of each section of music.
You can see a simple example of this using the song “I’ve Been to Harlem” below.
3. Create Practice Loops
Having the lyrics and phrases up on the screen allows you to be able to indicate to them what to sing without having to say a word. Flipping between slides is significantly faster than saying, “Everyone back to ____. Okay, one two ready….” They can see exactly the section you want them to sing.
As they learn the lyrics you can simply cover the projector or close the PowerPoint to check their memorization.
4. Save Your Voice
PowerPoints are also a great way to save your voice and have a very effective silent rehearsal. Outline your lesson plan on the first slide, indicate rehearsal order on the next, and even create a mini-lesson on the third, for example.
5. At Home Practice
By saving your PowerPoint as a PDF and making it accessible on your website, students can access it for review and practice at home. You can see an example of how this might look here.
PowerPoint presentations can be one of the most useful tools in your classroom technology repertoire.
Can’t use Powerpoint?
Can’t run PowerPoint on your system? Here are some web-based alternatives you can try:
- Google Slides– a good go-to that’s very similar to PowerPoint and totally free.
- Canva– a design studio with a lot of free images you can access in addition to those you upload on your own. Lots of beautiful fonts and pre-sets but not as flexible. Free with paid stock image options.
- Prezi– very visually-stimulating, allows you to zoom in and out of each ‘slide’ or image. The most adaptive. Free.
- Adobe Spark– beautiful templates and very intuitive. Free.
About the author
Elisa Jones has been teaching music for nearly 20 years and currently holds the prestigious position of elementary music teacher at a private K-8 Catholic School in Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. You can find her music educator blog at ProfessionalMusicEducator.com and on Facebook at School Music CEO.
Connect with Elisa Jones
- Visit Elisa’s website
- Connect with Elisa on Facebook
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