I am thrilled to be presenting at Howard Community College's Drummin Draggons music camp today. I will be sharing a number of apps that I use to practice effectively. Friend and colleague, Tim McKay, puts on this awesome camp every year. I am glad to be joining as a clinician.
If you are a student at this camp (or not), you can find links to download all of the apps I discussed today here: Drummin Dragons Technology Presentation | July 26, 2018 | Robby Burns
This week on The Class Nerd, Craig and I pick apart our favorite iOS productivity app, Drafts.
I always explain Drafts as the app that most diminishes the cognitive load of my music teaching job and beyond. Gone are the days of writing down notes, todos, and other reminders on whatever scrap piece of paper is nearest to me only to forget everything when its most important. Drafts is the fastest way I know to take down an idea. I don't even have to think about what kind of idea it is because Drafts offers a rich list of actions that can send the text to other apps.
This episode might be out most technical yet, but don't let that scare you off. Drafts is one of those apps that is as complicated as you want it to be. You can get a ton of productivity out of it with very little learning curve.
Listen to the episode here.
It’s an exciting day for users of Apple products today. Two announcements that caught my attention are highlighted below...
Affinity Designer Debuts on iPad as a Full-Featured Graphic Design Tool – MacStories:
Nearly one year ago, Serif released Affinity Photo for the iPad as a full-featured photo editing powerhouse. Unlike what companies such as Adobe do, where a Mac app like Photoshop is broken down into less powerful versions on iOS, Affinity Photo was brought to the iPad with no compromises whatsoever. Today, that same philosophy is bringing us Serif's second major iPad app: Affinity Designer.
Where Affinity Photo focuses on photo editing, Affinity Designer is a vector-based illustration tool. And with full support for the Apple Pencil, iOS 11's drag and drop, and system technologies like Metal, the app looks like the ultimate portable design studio.
For a limited time, Affinity Designer is available at a launch price of $13.99, 30% off the regular price of $19.99.
I have long been looking for something like Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. I have been very happy with OmniGraffle for designing seating charts, posters, flyers, and other graphics on iOS, especially because it syncs flawlessly to its Mac counterpart. For $13.99 I am going to be very tempted to give Affinity Designer a spin. Download it here.
Next up, Sonos!
Sonos Adds AirPlay 2 Support to Certain Speaker Models – MacStories
Sonos announced today that it has added AirPlay 2 support to compatible speaker systems. The update allows users to stream audio to the company’s Sonos One, Beam, Playbase, and the second generation Play:5 speakers from iOS apps that support AirPlay 2 of and from iTunes on a Mac.
I recently purchased a HomePod and have been looking forward to pairing its audio with my existing Sonos Playbar in the living room and Sonos Play:1 in the bedroom. Jason Snell wrote a great post for Macworld that gets into the all the details about how all of these different smart speakers play together.
Sonos update adds AirPlay 2 support | Macworld:
Perhaps most impressively, all AirPlay 2 speakers can play music in perfect synchronization. If you’ve got a HomePod or two and a compatible Sonos device, you can now select all those devices and play music through them, entirely in sync. Even better, if you’ve got incompatible Sonos devices and place them in the same group as an AirPlay 2-compatible Sonos device via the Sonos app, those speakers will also play synchronously. I was able to get music to play in sync throughout my house this morning, via a paired set of HomePods, a Play:5, and the (incompatible) Play:1 in my bathroom.
My two Sonos speakers are incompatible. So I can’t get too excited unless I buy a new Sonos One or Play:5. I do need one of these for the basement but it is a steep price to pay. Furthermore, it is a bummer that the old speakers cannot be controlled individually through the Apple home app, only as a group with a compatible Sonos.
I can bypass this problem in the living room, where my TV (with Apple TV attached) is running its audio through a Sonos Playbar. AirPlay allows a phone to send audio to an Apple TV on the same network, so if I want to control the Playbar individually, I just send audio to the living room Apple TV its attached to. The bedroom will be a different story, through I cannot imagine that many scenarios where I will need separate music or volume control in the bedroom and basement.
If you didn’t know, I launched a new podcast with Nashville teacher, Craig McClellan, last week. It’s called The Class Nerd Podcast, and it is focused on connecting teachers to apps, services, tools, and tips, that will help them better do their jobs.
We just released episode two, and it is all about third party email apps. Check it out here.
As was teased last week, I am launching a new podcast. Well, it is here! Craig McClellan and I are excited to launch The Class Nerd Podcast today. Craig writes at The Class Nerd Blog…
Introducing The Class Nerd Podcast:
Robby and I are both teachers who are passionate about our jobs, but also about not making our jobs our lives. We both work hard to make teaching as efficient and effective as possible so we have time to spend with our families and on other things we care about. A lot of this increased efficiency has come out of our love of Apple devices, and we have both tried to share our workflows with the greater education community through blogs, and in Robby’s case, a book. This podcast is meant to be another resource for teachers.
Semester 1 of The Class Nerd Podcast will be 10 weekly episodes around 25-30 minutes in length. Hopefully this is conducive to the busy lifestyles of teachers, and can be some easy summer PD.
With the the school year ending for me today, I cannot help but think this could provide a nice listen for some of you while you are traveling in planes, cars, or relaxing by the beach this summer.
Episode 1 is all about tools for beefing up your email productivity, focusing predominantly on Apple’s Mail app. We hope you enjoy it!
I am excited to share a sneak peek of a project I have been working on for the past few months.
Nashville based educator, Craig McClellan, and I are launching a podcast later this summer called The Class Nerd. Our hope is to introduce teachers to some really cool technology tips and workflows that will help them on their path to being better educators.
As we sort out all of the technical details that come with managing a podcast, check out "Episode 0: Tech Origin Stories" where Craig and I discuss our paths to becoming classroom tech nerds.
It has been a while since I posted here. I just finished concert season at my school. My music team of four just had six concerts all in one week, one of which including taking eight buses of middle school students to Hershey Park. Between all of these concerts we directed over 14 performing ensembles. I am working on a post to outline some of these things, along with lengthier reflections on my year professionally. Until then, here are topics I am planning to post about soon…
During the past week, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference happened and two of the apps I most rely on to get my work done, OmniFocus 3 and Dorico 2, were released. Concerts have made it hard to write about software, let alone even try it out. I have just finished watching the WWDC Keynote my second time, and have been playing with OmniFocus 3 extensively. I have a lot of thoughts on all of these subjects and I plan to post about them soon. I also have some great podcast guests lined up for the early summer which will include discussion on Apple news, updates to my productivity workflows, and some major advancements in music technology education.
Of course, there will be some writing challenges. The school year ends on June 20th and then I immediately fly to Telluride, CO for the Teluride Bluegrass festival. I fly home one day before I begin writing curriculum for my district’s new 7th/8th grade, year long, general music curriculum. If you didn’t know, I teach a general music class at my school as well as band. Curruclum writing ends and then I immediately go to Hawaii for 15 days, and then return to home, FINALLY, for a few weeks of rest before music summer camps start.
Looking forward to some relaxing, summer adventures, and writing here on my blog.
My ability to handle the cognitive load of teaching middle school band is largely supported by a wonderful app called Drafts, made by Agile Tortoise. I will detail a little bit about how I use this app below, but I want to first say that the developer of Drafts, Greg Pierce, very generously chatted with me about it on my podcast recently. Greg also has a background in guitar, ethnomusicology, and folk studies. He has an interesting journey towards app development, which we also talked about on the show. Listen to the episode here.
So what is Drafts? Drafts is the starting point for all text on my iPhone and iPad. It sits on the dock, right under my thumb, and I press it every time I have any kind of thought that I don’t want to slip away. Drafts opens to a blank white screen and a keyboard so you can instantly start typing. Adding a new Draft is as simple as tapping the plus button. You don't need to worry about what kinds of thoughts these are, or what kinds of apps you should be capturing them in. They can be todos, messages, emails, future blog posts, anything. Picture me at the front of the classroom before band rehearsal. 70 students pouring into the room. Instruments blaring loud. Countless questions being thrown at me at once. Chaos all around. From the podium, I leave Drafts open alongside my sheet music and type anything that comes to mind. If a student tells me they don’t have a 2nd trombone part to Air and Dance, I write a note in Drafts. If a flute is broken, I start an email to the repair shop requesting for them to come pick it up. If I want to take general notes on our rehearsal progress, I start typing that in another draft. Even if I remember I need eggs at the grocery store later, I type that too!
A beautiful, distraction free, user interface, as soon as you launch Drafts.
Drafts pairs perfectly with the sheet music app forScore in split view mode.
All of this stuff is categorized in the inbox where I can easily access it by swiping to the right. Here I can view any current or past archived draft, flag important ones, or send them to the trash. Once I am ready to process it all, I swipe left to reveal actions. Actions can do many things. At the most simple level, they send text to other apps like messages, email, a todo app, or Twitter. But actions can be heavily customized. They can perform multiple steps on text, and even run JavaScript on them. In the example below, you can see that I have a variety of drafts. Meeting notes, a few tasks, a start to a grocery list, a text to my wife, and the beginning of an email. To process these I would use the following actions, respectively: Send the meeting notes to the Apple Notes app, the tasks go to OmniFocus (where I manage all of my todos), the groceries go into my Reminders app grocery list, the text to my wife goes to Messages, and the email goes to Mail. Many of these actions happen in the background, meaning that I don't leave Drafts, and can therefore process them really quickly. You don't need to be a fancy pants to get awesome actions into Drafts, by the way. Some of my most frequently used actions are built into the app. There is also an Action Directory where you can steal the wonderful actions that others have already made.
Swiping right reveals all unprocessed drafts.
Swiping left reveals all of the various actions you can perform on drafts.
Drafts 5, the newest version, was released recently. The app is free which means there is absolutely no excuse not to give it a try. Some of the power features like creating your own actions and using automation require a subscription price of $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year.
This is the Edit Action screen. Actions are highly customizable. This particular action a) saves meeting notes to Evernote, b) saves tasks begining with "@" to my OmniFocus task app, and c) emails the notes to others in attendance.
I have always treated Drafts as a starting point for text. Interestingly, the new version has added some features that encourage using it as a note app replacement. You can now tag notes, create lists with checkable boxes, and even create custom workspaces that you organize your text into (paid feature). I am not sure if using Drafts this way is for me, but here are some ways I have been experimenting with it…
I have a "default" workspace depicted by the blue star icon below. Navigating workspaces is as easy as tapping custom icons in the lower left. My default workspace is where all of my unprocessed notes go. These generate a badge that appears on the icon of the Drafts app so that I don't forget to act upon them later. This workspace resembles the extent to which I was using the previous version of Drafts.
My default workspace. This functions like I used to use Drafts before workspaces became available.
My next workspace is where I keep active lists of things like recommended movies to see, blog ideas, and even a list of things I do every time I migrate to a new Mac. I can automatically append this list by pressing the "Add to list" action (available here) and then choosing which list to add to.
My lists workspace.
If a friend recommends a movie to me, I quickly write it in a draft without fiddling around with apps on my phone and getting distracted from conversation. Later, I append it to my movie list in one tap.
My next workspace is for blogging. I usually write my blog posts in a third party text editor called Ulysses which means that I usually get started in Drafts and then tap an action that sends the text there. But sometimes I do like to spend a little bit of time in Drafts writing before I take that step. For these types of drafts, I now have a tag called "blog" that allows them to show up separate from my other notes that need to be processed.
Blogging workspace.
My last workspace is called Sectionals. My band program has weekly classes for each instrument. Once a week, I see the flutes from my band during one period, the clarinets the next, etc. I do some lesson planning for these sectionals in a note app called Bear. In those same notes I also write down things that happen in the sectionals. Things I assigned, things I assessed, things I said, students absent, instruments I repaired, etc. Fiddling through my notes app to add these notes was getting cumbersome and was distracting me from engaging with my students. So I created a series of sectional related actions that enable me to automate part of this process. The “R1, R2...” actions in the image below are examples of text expansion. Tapping buttons like these expand text that I commonly type. R1 stands for Rotation 1, which I would type if I were taking notes on the first week trumpet sectional for the quarter. The other actions automatically append my sectional notes. For example, tapping SW Trumpet would take my draft and append it to the bottom of that particular note in the Bear note app.
My sectionals workspace. Custom actions can be organized into different groups. This particular one has actions that expand common text that I type in my sectional notes like which weekly rotation we are on. It also contains buttons that take the text and append them to different notes, depending on which instrument group I am in front of.
My sectional note in the Bear note taking app, now appended by Drafts.
As you can see, Drafts is a simple note app with infinite customizability. Check it out today at Get Drafts.
From now on, when someone asks me to explain why I am passionate about coffee, or anything relating to gear and brewing techniques, I am pointing them towards this concise post from friend, Allan Georgia (also guest on Robby Burns + Friends, episode 5). Read it!
On Coffee Makers: Don’t Put a Machine Between You & the Most Important Drink of the Day:
But there's an even bigger reason to dump the electric machine altogether. Coffee is, in its rich and complex heart, a ritual that defines our morning. Consider how many other drinks define a time of day. For many of us, coffee even becomes part of how we experience the passage of time itself––one cup leading to another, morning after morning, a companion as constant as the Sun. To craft your coffee by hand is to participate in the ritual and embrace the chance to make something with your own hands. Its a opportunity that is squandered if you outsource the labor to a machine and pass by a hands-on craft for the sake of convenience.
But there's more. The call to craft your cup has never been more relevant than now when a true coffee renaissance has filled the world with beans that are the product of passionate producers in the coffee-growing regions of the world.
...
once you have your hands on beans that have been lovingly farmed and expertly roasted, it is an outright calamity to put them at the mercy of a lukewarm drip machine and a scorching hot-plate. Crafting your cup does require some specialized equipment, but nothing too crazy.
I am getting a head start on the weekend and am posing my session notes for my seventh and FINAL music conference this school year. I am thrilled to have been invited to present at the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association Conference this weekend. My session is this coming Friday at 8:30 am in the Heritage A room. Here are the session notes for my presentation, Working with Digital Scores.
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