Considering the high amount of both korean and japanese students I have, it made me uncomfortable. One particular video, a woman is speaking korean and he calls her japanese. It's silly, but kind of rubs me the wrong way. Italian guy talking about spaghetti and the like. If you care about this sort of thing, they really sort of lean into stereotypes in some of the videos, too. That's because they go kind of wacky with the settings and stuff. They speak incredibly fast, and I've seen a lot of my low level english speakers really struggling to find out whats going on. I think when producing the videos they sort of left my kids out in the dark. My class is 99% english language learners. They're quirky and they make my kids laugh, but the real value in quaver, I find, is the lessons themselves. The quaver videos themselves aren't the best. Sure, it's great to call on prior knowledge, but I can see students lose interest when it's a song they've done before. My biggest gripe with the songs is that they re-use a lot of them for different topics and different grade levels. Some are just sort of.there, and I found myself looking for the connections to the lesson from time to time. Some are really well thought out, catchy, and really drive the idea home. These songs are sometimes hit or miss, too. It's sort of frustrating to teach a full song sometimes because they don't do a great job breaking up parts. Like, the songs are just sort of put on screen with the words sing-a-long style. While there are a lot of songs that the company has made, they don't really support audiation. Theres a pretty solid recorder section and even a beginner ukulele section for 5th grade. That being said, it was a great resource to cover things that I wasn't sure how to teach, or at least gave me some good ideas for how to create my own lessons which is really great for first year teachers. It's marketed as a curriculum in a box, and I agree a lot with what /u/Idahogirl556 said about my degree being worth more than pushing a button. There are some actually well done lessons. I'll talk more about this stuff in the cons section, too. The kids are engaged when we use it, so I guess I'm using technology in my classroom "more" than I normally would. Sure, I could make many of the games and stuff with the regular SMARTBOARD tech, but this stuff is pretty polished for what it is. Here's my mini review.Īs you would imagine, it's great for technology. My school purchased quaver before I started there and it was expected of me to use it once I started there.
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