After the success of my April assignment, Quaransing , I wanted to continue developing assignments that:
Kept my students singing
Allowed for some student choice
Provided some creative freedoms
Used Flipgrid (my kids LOVED using Flipgrid for Quaransing)
Normally, my students start the Chorus Creativity Project at this time of the year. In brainstorming whether to adapt this for online learning, I remembered that our student council typically hosts a school talent show in May. At one of our department Zoom meetings, I asked if they had thought about attempting one this year. After confirming they weren’t, I pitched the idea of our fine arts department hosting a virtual talent show to my team and principal.
How we developed our ideas for a virtual talent show
After agreeing to make this a department project, we sat down together (via Zoom) and worked out all of the details including:
Submission window
Video time limits
Submission guidelines
Entry format
I did some digging to see what other schools had done with their virtual talent shows. I was able to find some YouTube videos (which I linked as examples on the first document we created), and even some guidelines that others previously created. We used some of these materials as reference when deciding what we wanted our own talent show to look like. Everything ended up compiled in two shared Google Docs. The first document contained all of the info discussed above. The second document had information on how to use Flipgrid, and FAQ’s. We sent all information out to our students through our individual Google Classrooms, and emailed copies to our principal. Our principal forwarded the info to all students and staff in the entire school, so literally anyone in our building could participate! View editable versions of each of these documents by clicking on the buttons below:
This shows some of the visual art submissions we received. You can view all of them by visiting the talent show site at the end of this post.
What did we do during the submission window?
Our submission window was open for about 2 1/2 weeks. During that time, we:
checked submissions as they were turned in, and provided feedback to students through Flipgrid or email if anything needed to be changed for their video to meet the submission guidelines.
Responded to emails with questions regarding the talent show.
Worked on creating our own submissions. My video is below, but be sure to check out all of our faculty submissions, because my team is crazy awesome!
The evening of the submission deadline, my fine arts department met again on Zoom to discuss finalists, making sure we all agreed about submissions. Laura, our art teacher, suggested creating a website to display all finalist submissions, rather than just making submissions public on Flipgrid (which I thought was an awesome idea!). We took the next three days after the student deadline to get everything ready on the website, and our principal made everything public to our students and parents that following Monday. For the final touch, Josh, our orchestra director, suggested getting our principal to film a brief welcome message for the home page. Team work makes the dream work, am I right?
It's not super perfect, but I had fun putting it together for the kids! I cheated and used the Acapella app. If you've never checked it out before, you can do up to 30 sec. for free. After that, you have to sign up for a monthly subscription (but there's also a free trial option.)
Check out our final results!
We were really pleased with how the talent show turned out. We had a lot of submissions from both fine arts and non fine arts students alike, and got to see some really cool talents that wouldn’t normally have a place in a live talent show. The link to our virtual talent show page is below.
Take some time and look at what our students were able to do! Performing arts are divided by grade level, and visual arts, the faculty showcase, and virtual choir projects each have their own pages.
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