Improving intercultural collaboration among exchange students
Funded by the Erasmus+ program, this initiative examined how teachers can foster intercultural collaboration when exchanging students.
Research shows that simply working together of own students and international students is not enough to acquire international and intercultural competencies. The pedagogical support and the interaction with the local community abroad are important conditions.
This project examined what types of sound and music production could increase the quality of collaboration.
Students from the first grade of secondary school from Pio X in Treviso, Italy, and Pius X in Antwerp, Belgium, were the first to experiment with various software applications during their annual exchange program.
The resulting modules are free for you to use so you too can enhance the international experience of your students by focusing on music and sound productions that fit within the subject areas of different teachers.
Have your students research each other’s city by interviewing locals or transferring meteorological data of the region they visit to sound with sonification. Or have them make music for a presentation or a short movie scene.
A module-based approach
Each module has its particular set of instructions for a dedicated application. You can download and print these booklets so students can use them to collaborate in small teams.
You can mix and match these modules to accommodate the students’ projects.
Here are some examples and workflows:
Pick and choose
Below, you can go ahead and select and download the specific modules needed for your project. All instructions are in English, and each module is in a regular PDF format or as a PDF booklet that you can print.
Recording apps for smartphones
Interview like a pro
This module explains how to record an interview on a smartphone.
The selected apps are free of charge, work very well for recording simple interviews, and have multiple export capabilities. This allows the recordings to be edited on different platforms.
Select this module for Android smartphones: ASR Voice Recorder app.
Select this module for iPhones: Voice Record Pro app (also compatible with iPads)
Audio editing application
How to become an interview editing wizard
After making a recording, consider editing the audio module to improve the content quality while preserving the conversation’s authenticity. Ocenaudio is a free application that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Music production applications
Make a movie score with coding
This module focuses on making music for a short movie scene or a radio jingle. It uses the free coding program Sonic Pi, which runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Raspberry Pi.
Sonification
Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information. It involves converting data into sound so that the relationships within the data can be perceived, explored and enjoyed with our auditory system. Sonification has been used to represent various phenomena, experiments, and models, such as the radiation level of a Geiger counter, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, and the evolution of the universe.
Sonification of stars
This module explains how to mimic the sounds of vibrating stars using the free coding program Sonic Pi. This module is a perfect companion to various lesson materials provided by the European Space Education Resource Office (ESERO), ESA’s main way of supporting the primary and secondary education community in Europe.
