Quack!

I travel with a friend quite frequently, and we have a tendency to get up early to hit the ground running when we’re sightseeing. To accomplish this, my friend sets multiple alarms on her smartphone. The first alarm is a duck quacking. Then there are five minutes of silence. Next, we hear dogs barking. After five more restful minutes, we hear something that sounds like a cross between disco and elevator music. You get the idea. She usually saves the most obnoxious sounds for when we absolutely must get out of bed.

I was reminded of our wake-up system when I saw this pin about using a smartphone to make musical cues for the classroom. Why had I never thought about this? You can have a sound for cleanup time, a sound for calling students to circle time, etc. The iPhone actually has a musical cue app that looks really handy. After searching on my Samsung, I managed to find lots of sound effect apps that would do something similar, although you might not be able to rename the sounds to correspond to the activities.

What a happy use for a smartphone! It’s much happier than using it to get out of bed at the crack of dawn.

Do you use musical cues in your classroom?


11 thoughts on “Quack!

  1. I have always used my ipod, but this might be more handy than trying to find what I want on my ipod. I think I will also check it out on my ipad. I don’t have an iphone so… 🙂

  2. We have used that system for several years. The helper of the day gets to have the phone (my old cell phone) by their table. The funniest comment we received was from the two substitutes who were in our classroom during parent-teacher conferences was, “The phone went off. And all the children stopped what they were doing and went to the rug. We looked at each other and said, ‘It must be rug time!’.” Can anyone say, “Pavlov?”

  3. I use an app called Zedge that you can get pretty much anything. I have the clean up song I have set as an alarm when it’s clean up time.

  4. What app are you using for music transitions? I just downloaded Zedge and I couldn’t find any school related transitional songs. Thanks in advance!

  5. There’s one called Music Cue for the iphone, it costs $1.99; there may be a free app for this but I don’t know about it . You can read more about Music Cue, and get step by step directions- ios.appeero.com/a/music-cue.html.

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