Mark Pentleton

It’s a couple of weeks since I was in Cheltenham with enthusiastic teachers from up and down the country at the Apple Teacher Institute. As one of the ADEs I was leading workshops on podcasting and using iPod Touches (and iPads!) in the classroom, but one of my first duties at the conference was to do a keynote at 8:30 on the morning of the first full day of the conference. I had planned to do a session on my Mandarin Chinese Animation projects but having spent much of the journey down to Cheltenham listening to the Invictus soundtrack, full of wonderful South African rhythms and voices, I decided to do something different at the last minute.

I believe that GarageBand, part of the iLife suite of applications, is extremely useful in classrooms as a tool for providing rhythm to help learners repeat words, phrases, equations, formulae, etc. and I demonstrated this to the assembled delegates by teaching them some Zulu. Having visited South Africa for the first time last month I picked up a few phrases (which may find themselves included in a future podcast series…) in Zulu and I decided that I’d begin by teaching the word sanibonani, which is how you say “hello” to a group of people. I wanted to get in one of the lovely click sounds of Zulu, so I also taught the phrase ngisaqala ukufunda isiZulu – “I’m learning Zulu”.

The Voices and World Music jam packs for GarageBand provide some fantastic African sounds, so I prepared a backing track using some loops and a simple melody based on the two phrases. I then got everyone repeating the sounds, using the African rhythms as a background. We split up the audience, giving one half the tricky ngisaqala, the other half ukufunda, and then everyone said isiZulu together. Finally, I recorded them a couple of times chanting these phrases before putting everything together in GarageBand.

I only had 15 minutes for the entire Keynote, so I didn’t have time to put the final piece together there and then, but the idea was that the recording could then be shared among the learners, further consolidating their learning as they listened on their own iPods etc. To be honest I’d forgotten about the whole project as the rest of the ATI took over, but I remembered about the GarageBand file this morning so I’ve put together a performance using the backing track and the recordings made at ATI and you can have a listen here and let me know what you think!

Ngiyabonga (thanks) to everyone at ATI, and I hope you like it.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:35 — 2.2MB)