‘We use handsets to quiz the children about music’
Terrace Road primary school in inner-city Swansea uses an unusual tool to get pupils engaged in music. Qwizdom is a hand-held voting system, like the ask-the-audience handset used inWho Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which lets the whole class respond to questions, with their answers shown on a graph on an interactive PowerPoint slide.
Teacher Peter Owen explains: “The children in this area don’t tend to have the advantages of music tuition, so there are quite low skills and some reluctance, particularly among some of the boys, towards learning music. But ICT helps to get them engaged. We haven’t got the money for computers in every classroom, so sometimes we take the music class to the IT suite to have a play with music software, but with the Qwizdom handsets we can use them alongside the instruments.
“In music, you’re desperate for them to use their ears so we use the Qwizdoms to play a little ‘name-that-tune’ quiz. It’s a nice warm-up activity that gets them listening. We also use the handsets to listen to sound clips or look at pictures of instruments on the screen and then ask questions. Is the instrument woodwind or percussion? Can they name the instrument? With choir practice, we use it to see if the children can remember the next line in a piece of music. The idea is that by predicting what comes next, they can learn the words much more quickly.
“In recorder class, we can play a note and show a picture of the recorder with the fingering and ask them is this right? You can really get them to think about it. It’s the anonymity that makes it so powerful because it helps grow their confidence.”