Creating Educational Songs with AI Tools

A lot of times we focus on how AI tools can generate text, such as lesson plans, rubrics, assessments, leveled reading passages, and more. As awesome as those uses are, AI can create much more than text.

Recently AI has become more and more multi-modal, meaning that it is also able to understand and generate media in other forms such as images, audio, music, and video. Each of these deserves its own blog post (or several) but for this entry we are going to explore making a song with AI.

Specifically I decided to see if I could use AI tools to create an educational song that could be used to help teach a concept to students. The plan was to use ChatGPT to write the lyrics for the song, and then use Udio to generate the music and to sing the completed song.

For this test I used the water cycle as my topic, and I am so excited with the final product! See below to listen to the water cycle song, and for the directions and tools I used to create it. I hope this will inspire you to create a song, and I would love to hear what you make, as well as any suggestions you have for making this project better.

Free Media Resources for Projects

When creating a project, such as a presentation, video, poster, podcast, or more, one challenge is finding media elements for your project that are free to use.

Thankfully there are many resources online that provide free, high-quality multimedia content that you and your students are able to use for free in any of your creations.

These include:

🖼️ Free Photos

✂️ Free Clipart and Icons

🏃 Free Animated GIFs

🅰️ Free Fonts and Text

🔊 Free Sound Effects

🎵 Free Music

▶️ Free Videos

🔱 Free Design Templates

In this blog post we will explore lists of free resources for each of these categories. If you have other sites that you use for free media, please let me know so I can add them to these lists.

And although the media elements provided through these sites are free, be sure to check for any attribution requirements to make sure you provide proper credit when using any content.

Hipster Google 2 - Even More Google Tools You Probably Never Heard Of

A couple years ago I shared my original "Hipster Google" post, where I listed a collection of lesser known Google tools. The idea was to have some fun with the "hipster" theme, where something is cool because very few people know about it. Like a band that hasn't become popular yet, or a restaurant that is hidden away, or a style that is not mainstream.

At that time I put together a collection of Hipster Google tools that weren't as popular as the "big ones" such as Gmail, Drive, Docs, and such. Even though these Google tools may have flown under the radar, they were still valuable for use in the classroom.

Well since then, so many new unique Google tools have come out! I have done my best to grab these new tools as they came out and add them to my ever-growing list in Google Docs. However, I did not update my original blog post to share these new tools in detail. So I figured it was time for a new entry to share all of the awesome new Hipster Google resources!

You can see the original list of Hipster Google tools in my blog post from a couple years back: "Hipster Google - Google Tools You Probably Never Heard Of".

And below you can see a new collection of lesser know, but awesome, tools. As always, chances are you will have heard of some of these, but hopefully there will be a few new ones on the list for you to explore. If we all try hard enough we can get schools using these all around the world, and they won't be Hipster anymore. But for now they are, so put on your slouchy beanie and thick-framed glasses and have fun!

Google Tools and Activities for Music Education

A lot of times it is common to focus on "The Big 4" of language arts, math, science, and social studies, when exploring technology tools for learning. However, it is important to see how technology can be integrated into all subject areas and skills.

One excellent area for using Google tools is in music education. Technology can help students create their own music, as well as explore and understand musical concepts that may be difficult to visualize otherwise.

In this blog post we will take a look at many tools from Google, or that work with Google, that can be used for teaching, learning, and creating with music. These include Chrome Music Lab, Song Exploder's Inside Music, AI Duet, Groove Pizza, Mix Lab, Flat, and many more!

See below for details, links, and descriptions for all of these tools.

Learning Music, Art, Science, Math and more with Chrome Music Lab

When I used to teach middle school math, one unit I always loved to do each year was my "Music and Math" unit. We explored lots of connections between music and math, while learning about fractions, exponents, prime factorization, and more. We even concluded the unit with a day of student performances called "Curtstock" or "Curtsapalooza" (depending on the year).

One of the great things about music is how connected it is to other disciplines. As mentioned above, music can tie into math through fractions (duration of notes), exponents (decibels), multiples (beat), and prime factorization (harmonizing notes). Likewise music can connect with science when exploring sound waves, frequencies, and more, as has influence and occurrence in history, literature, and art.

To help explore musical concepts and how they relate to other topics, Google has created the Chrome Music Lab. This is a collection of 13 interactive "experiments" (so far) that let users create, play, and learn with a wide range of music concepts. These activities are also cross-platform, working on laptops, tablets, and phones.

See below for an explanation of each of these engaging tools...