Gigajam News 

Open College Network Credit4Learning, one of the UK’s national accreditation services for learning and skills, has announced that Gigajam’s Essential Skills Courses for the guitar, bass, keyboards and drums can now be studied to earn credits to gain entry into further and higher education courses.

Schools across London have become the first in England to receive a Gigajam upgrade via their local broadband network. London Grid for Learning hosts the first five lessons of Gigajam’s Essential Skills Courses for guitar, bass, keyboards and drums, which are freely available to schools.

The new-look lessons have been adapted in response to feedback from schools and were developed to meet with the technical standards of Learning Platforms and anytime, anywhere learning.

The five significant changes are:
• lessons now load much quicker, as they are presented through a web browser instead of PDF files
• the ‘how to’ videos of professional musicians are embedded in the web pages, which speeds up streaming
• all lessons are narrated, so that students can listen and read the instructions
• there are four lesson approaches to suit different learning styles;
o fully narrated lessons
o video and exercises only
o printable PDF book format
o TV shows

If your school is within the London Grid for Learning you are invited to use the new lessons at www.lgfl.org.uk (http://cms.lgfl.net/lgfl/web/content/grid)

Today Gigajam released their new Analyser 2.7 music assessment software.

Analyser is a unique tool that takes music files recorded by a student during a Gigajam lesson exercise and generates a graphical display of how well the student did, along with a percentage assessment rating.

It does this by comparing the student's recorded performance with the professionally written lesson content supplied as part of the the Gigajam Essential Skills courses.

The courses are geared around contemporary music for Guitar, Bass, Keyboards and Drums and are ideally suited to beginners and intermediate players alike.

A student first reads through the professionally written lesson notes, watches a video of the exercise in question and then hears the music played back in the Gigajam Xtractor software - which also allows the student to adjust the tempo and fade particular instruments in and out of the mix. They are also able to isolate parts of an exercise by setting loop points, so that they may focus on a particular number of bars.

If the student is using a MIDI enabled instrument, they can also record their own performance alongside the exercise, save it to disk and play it back to hear how they did. They may then push the "A" button to perform an analysis using Gigajam Analyser.

The student can also send the saved performance to their tutor or teacher via e-mail so that a remote assessment can be performed using another copy of Gigajam Analyser and Xtractor - without having to have any musical equipment hooked up whatsoever. The remote tutor is also able to play back the recorded file to hear the students performance using a PC whilst they visually assess the recording using Analyser.

Analyser forms part of a "closed loop" approach to education as part of Gigajam's policy to supply Key Stage 2 and 3 classrooms with an interactive music education platform - which is also available for purchase using e-learning credits through the Curriculum Online service.

It is also available on the Gigajam website to the general public as a single user licence.