Using iBooks in Music

Claire has shared the transformative work that the music department has undertaken:

This year, the music department have decided to go ‘paperless’ for KS3 and have introduced iBooks to enable us to do this.

We have been using Showbie for KS3 lessons for the last few years but wanted to go one step further by providing a way to easily share resources. Our iBooks include all of the objectives and success criteria for students along with any resources they may need for each scheme of work. The iBook also contains all of the homework as well as additional ‘help’ sections relevant to each scheme.

The use of iBooks has given us the opportunity to embed videos of practical work being modelled as well as differentiated resources. This is a huge advantage to students as it means they can access help as and when they need it, as many times as necessary. We have found it particularly useful with keyboard work as students are able to watch either Tim or I playing the part on the keyboard as many times as they need to, as well as playing along to it. It also means that any non-specialists or cover teachers don’t need to worry about doing this themselves and allows students to continue with their practical work effectively even when we are not there.

Although it takes some time to set up each iBook, it saves us a lot of time during the term when it comes to planning and preparing for lessons. As all of our objectives and success criteria are already within the book, we don’t need to make any slides shows containing these. We also don’t need to spend time creating and photocopying resources. We have designed the books so that they can be used by any teacher and whilst they aren’t too prescriptive and planned lesson by lesson, they do cover all of the key content for each scheme of work.

As this is the first term of us using these, we are still in the process of improving them but so far they have proved popular with students. They are stored on students’ iPads and no Wi-Fi is needed to access them (with the exception of any external links) so we can still use and access them even when the Internet goes down!

I’ve included some screen shots of examples from Year 7 and Year 8 iBooks, but please come and speak to us in music or ask any KS3 student if you want to see an iBook in action or find out any more!