How to address violence in the news with your students.
Teachers should demonstrate the app to students and explain the visual feedback for each exercise. Project the app with an interactive whiteboard and show how a practice session works, and then give students opportunities to try it on their iOS devices. Since the app is for personal use, it's best used outside of school, where students can practice in a quiet environment and work on improving. Teachers can then use class time to check in with students and offer tips for success, such as warm-up activities like breathing exercises and facial muscle relaxation before practicing with the app. Students can report back to teachers on how they're doing and ask for advice, perhaps doing solo performances for critique.
Continue readingVanido is an iOS app for vocal practice. Users need to create an account via Google, Facebook, or email address. The app begins by testing vocal range and then adjusts the exercises based on voice type. Singers receive three free exercises per day that work on head voice, chest voice, and foundational skills. The paid subscription includes scales and agility exercises and offers unlimited monthly or yearly access to all exercises. To practice with real songs, users can connect to Spotify Premium or Apple Music accounts and sing along.
No education accounts and no integration with classroom management systems mean that teachers won't receive student progress reports. To work around the limitations, teachers could design a way to have students record samples of their vocal work at home and share them with the teacher.
On the plus side, teachers will find that Vanido's vocal exercises may be very similar to those in their own classrooms. However, while Vanido does identify issues, it doesn't give instructions on how to correctly achieve good vocal performance outcomes. This means it could be easy for budding singers to develop bad habits tuned to the ways this app analyzes performance. In order for students to use the app effectively, teachers will need to be proactive and make sure that they're already teaching foundational vocal concepts, such as what it means to "drop your jaw," what "head voice" and "chest voice" refer to, how to correctly straighten a voice or add vibrato, and how to control breathing. If at-home use of Vanido is combined with this more substantive in-person instruction and also in-person performance and critique, it could be helpful for students needing some motivation. Vanido definitely benefits from a great gimmick and excellent design that students will likely be drawn to. But as a solely self-driven learning tool without any teacher support, it'll likely be more of cool curiosity than something transformative.
Because students will need to create personal accounts and the privacy policy states that data is collected, teachers should make sure that the app is approved for use in their school district.