Audio Love Letters

Purpose & objective

This session celebrates sounds connected to identity. Learners come from many diverse backgrounds and empowering learners to capture their first languages/cultural sounds is important to increase representation for under-represented people. As an educator of colour, it is critical to provide opportunities for everyone to share who they are.

Creating with audio is often a challenge for educators but can be a powerful mode to communicate and capture learning. This session supports educators as designer and facilitators using sound in a creative way. Sound is sampled from the learner’s environment and captured using an iPad. The learner’s voice is captured and different features of audio capture will be shared to provide different entry points on how the learner’s voice is recorded to engage all learners. Creativity is nurtured and promoted as a way to communicate ideas and foster inclusion among the learners.

Outline

1) Minds-on (10 minutes) Love Language Exploration - The idea of love language will be explored using examples from pictures books and mainstream media - Participants will share in chat examples of what their love language might be or ways others may have express it

2) Action (40 minutes)
A) GarageBand Introduction Participants will be introduced to GarageBand on iOS as a tool to capture and create audio. An exemplar of an audio love letter will be shared and deconstructed. For participants without iOS devices, soundtrap will be used as an alternative.

B) Writing the Love Letter Participants will be guided through the capturing and creating process to create an audio love letter. - Sample sounds from the environment - Add voiceover to describe love language

3) Consolidation (10 minute)
Resources will be shared to deep dive into using GarageBand to capture and create audio compositions. Extension activities will be shared to leverage the music composition tools to create a soundtrack to the audio love letter.

Supporting research

https://blog.ed.ted.com/2021/03/15/do-you-know-the-5-love-languages-heres-what-they-are-and-how-to-use-them/