This is the first blog in a guest blog series by Amy Burns, the Community Coordinator at Midnight Music, featuring resources from the Ultimate Free Music Tech Resources Guide.
All About the Whacky Wizards Website
Whacky Wizards is a website that was a result of a graduate project by Leo Brooks at the University of Lethbridge between 2019 and 2022. Data collected from a field test of the program in more than a dozen schools in Southern Alberta became the basis of his Master’s thesis titled Whacky Wizards: Designing and Assessing an Online Interactive program for Elementary Music Education.
Whacky Wizard’s Song Wizard App
In the Song Wizard, you can have your students perform simple melodies like Twinkle Twinkle or Ode to Joy on Boomwhackers.
Options:
- When you select the song, the boomwhackers that are involved in the song appear as the colors with the note names in them.
- You have the option to turn off the note names and to turn off the ball drops (the balls drop on the boomwhacker to indicate when you play that note).
- If you turn on the Loop Song, you can have your students play it multiple times.
- Turn on the Accelerate Loop, and each time the song plays, the tempo will increase.
Song Wizard Uses in the Classroom:
Perform as a whole class activity.
Mix boomwhackers and other pitched instruments and place them in a circle. Turn on Loop Song and Accelerate Loop. Have students perform the song. When finished, they move over one instrument as the song plays again with a faster tempo. Each time, as the students move over one instrument, the song increases in tempo. This is an activity my students love!
Place this as a station
Group students into groups of 5 or 6. When they get to this station, they have to pick a song with the notes that match the number of their group (Twinkle has six notes and would need six students). They perform the song for that amount of time at the station. Use the Accelerated Loop function to see if they can adjust to the new tempo.
Whacky Wizard’s Rhythm Tutor App
- With the Rhythm Tutor tool, you can choose two Boomwhacker notes and a style (Rock, Djembe, etc) and perform pre-set patterns or your own patterns with the musical style.
- You can also change the tempo to adjust to the students’ needs.
Uses in the classroom:
- Use this to work on two-note patterns in songs, especially songs with the pitches sol and mi.
- Warm up the class using the preset patterns.
- Change the backtrack and discuss the various musical styles.
- Place this in a station with small groups to practice reading and performing with two notes.
Need more than two notes? Use Whacky Looper!
- Whacky Looper allows you to use all diatonic notes of the boomwhackers. This is great because you can take the first two phrases of a song like “Pass the Pumpkin” and use a djembe ensemble as the backing track for your students to play along (see below).
- Or, use a preset pattern to warm up your students before they perform a song using the Boomwhackers.
Final Thoughts
Have you ever used Whacky Wizards before? What’s your favorite tool? Let us know!
If you loved Whacky Wizards and want hundreds of other free music tech resources from across the web, be sure to grab a free copy of the annually updated Ultimate Free Music Tech Resources Guide!
About the Author
In 2019, Amy appeared on PBS’s Caucus NJ with Steve Adubato to discuss the importance of music education in early childhood. In 2020, Oxford University Press published her fourth book titled, Using Technology with Elementary Music Approaches, a book of lessons that integrates technology into the approaches of Dr. Feierabend’s First Steps in Music, Kodály approach, Orff Schulwerk Approach, and Project-Based Learning. The overviews for each approach were written by Dr. Missy Strong (Dr. Feierabend’s First Steps Approach), Glennis Patterson (Kodály), Ardith Collins (Orff Schulwerk), and Cherie Herring (Project-Based Learning).
Amy has been the MMC Coordinator for five years and has recently expanded her role in elementary music education by becoming the Elementary Consultant for MusicFirst.
To learn more about Amy, visit her website and be sure to follow her on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Want more resources for music tech teachers?
Hello! I’m Katie Argyle – an Australian music technology trainer and consultant with a passion for helping music teachers through my business Midnight Music. Yes – I’m a qualified teacher but I don’t currently teach in a school. I help teachers through the Midnight Music Membership Community– a go-to online hub for tech-focussed professional development.
The Midnight Music Membership Community features:
- step-by-step training
- world-class online courses
- bite-sized learning through digital badges
- creative lesson ideas
It’s designed for teachers of all skill levels – from self-proclaimed ‘technophobes’ to intermediate and advanced tech users. You’ll learn how to integrate technology into your music teaching without the stress, so you can boost classroom outcomes, engage your students on a deeper level, and inspire a lifelong love of music!
If you want simple, effective ideas for using technology in music education, I would LOVE to help you inside the Midnight Music Community.
