I will be presenting a session at the NJMEA Conference this week titled Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers. In preparation for this presentation, I have revisited this topic on my podcast with similar content to make it quickly accessible in the feed for attendees of the session.
I've got a new podcast episode out, and while it's probably not in time for most of your shopping, the stuff we discussed are amongst my favorite things of 2022 and are certainly great ideas to treat yourself with down the road, if not sooner.
Show regulars Craig McClellan and Dr. David MacDonald join the show to talk about stuff we like.
My current method for tracking student progress is a giant Numbers spreadsheet with clickable star icons for how many "stars" they earn on each performance. I am using Craft to give students more transparent, informal, and qualitative feedback about what they should be working on.
This same Numbers spreadsheet was able to pump out the above table, graph, and charts. Their graphical nature and intuitive ease allowed me to better understand my own shortcomings in this process and what resources, changes, and school supports I needed to make improvement. This helped me to construct a meaningful narrative in a recent SLO meeting.
I hope to cover Numbers and Craft in greater detail later on down the road, as well as my successes in teaching instrumental music performance at an individualized level. If you want more on this, I certainly recommend the hyperlinked podcast episodes above.
Making the Grade is a reoccurring weekly series on 9to5Mac written by Bradley Chambers. It typically features tech analysis concerning Apple's relationship to education.
I recommend subscribing to 9to5Mac on Twitter or in an RSS app (like Reeder 5) if you are interested in more. Here is a link to a recent article...
In the hours after the WWDC Keynote, there are always little “nuggets” of news that come out that didn’t make the event, but can often be pretty impactful because it can give you an idea of where Apple is moving in the future. When 9to5Mac first spotted the mention of the custom domains in iCloud in the moments after the Keynote, I knew immediately this was the first step to offering this service to schools
There are a handful of music shows that are in my regular rotation. They span the topics of performance, conducting, theory, musicology, and pedagogy
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
Great show for people who want to learn more about classical music, regardless of experience level with it.
Sound Expertise
Will Robin has conversations with scholars about music. This show goes deep, but I find it really approachable no matter how much experience you have with the weekly topic.
The Third Story
Leo Sidran hosts long-form interviews with musicians from various backgrounds. I particularly enjoyed the interviews with Cory Henry, Becca Stevens Louis Cole.
He really gets the guests to open up and reveal their humanity, intimate accounts of their life experiences, and creative journey.
The Brass Junkies
This is one of the few instrumental music education shows that doesn't feel like the air has been sucked from the room when I listen.
This show features candid, personal, conversations with brass musicians from all over, about their professional journey and pedagogy.
Everything Band Podcast
Mark J. Connor does an excellent job interviewing band teachers, performers, and composers of music for winds and percussion.
UpBeat
This is an awesome podcast about conducting, with great industry advise and interviews with conductors from all over.
I may be a little biased because I went to school with one of the hosts, John Devlin.
The show is great and the parody ads are hilarious.
Are you coming to my TMEA session, Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software today? It starts at 3 pm! Here are the session notes which include links to all of the software mentioned in the presentation.
Are you going to be at the Texas Music Educators Association conference next week? If so, I hope to see you there! I am presenting a session and appearing on a panel.
Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software - Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 3 pm
Session description: If you are teaching in person, remotely, or hybrid, learn about great software you can use to reinforce the growth of perfor- mance skills among your students! Explore how students can use Noteflight Learn, Soundtrap, Flipgrid, and Google Docs to demonstrate technical skills, compose music, respond to music, multitrack-record themselves playing ensemble literature, col- laborate in chamber ensembles synchronously, and more.
Music Technology Tips You Can Use Today - Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 7 pm
Each author will talk for a few minutes about their book and give one tip that a teacher could take immediately into the classroom the following day. I will be talking about organizing digital score libraries and managing your email inbox.
Session description:
The Prestissimo “Essential Music Technology” series, published by Oxford University Press, is a collection of handy books containing tips and advice on how to incorporate technology into your music teaching situation easily. In this session, authors who have written books in the series will share their best tips from the books with you. This round-table style discussion will be led by series editor Richard McCready (TIME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year 2013). There will also be a prize drawing at the session for free copies of some of the Prestissimo series books.
List of Panelists:
Robby Burns is a band director and general music teacher at Ellicott Mills Middle School in Maryland, where he is also an active performing percussionist and private instructor. He is the author of “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and hosts the blog and podcast Music Ed Tech Talk.
Michelle Chen is Senior Editor of Music Education and Performance at Oxford University Press. She joined OUP in 2020 and previously held positions at Palgrave Macmillan and Bloomsbury Publishing.
Dr. Rick Dammers is the Dean of the College of Performing Arts and Professor of Music Education at Rowan University. He is the co-author of the book “Practical Music Education Technology”, is the author of the technology chapter in the “Oxford Handbook of Preservice Music Teacher Education in the United States” and is the recipient of the 2010 TI:ME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year Award.
Catherine Dwinal is the educational technology specialist working for QuaverEd and TI:ME’s 2014 Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year. Catherine is the author of “Interactive Visual Ideas for Musical Classroom Activities” and has the pleasure of working with thousands of educators from all over the country helping them to integrate technology into the classroom.
Norm Hirschy is Executive Editor for Books on Music at Oxford University Press. Prior to joining OUP in 2004, he studied at The College of Wooster and at The Ohio State University.
Ronald E. Kearns is a retired instrumental music teacher. He is the author of “Recording Tips for Music Educators”, as well as Quick Reference for Band Directors” and “Quick Reference for Band Directors Who Teach Orchestra” (NAfME/RLE Publishing).
Marjorie LoPresti is the US Digital Content Manager for MusicFirst, Adjunct Professor of Music Education Technology at Rutgers University, and co-author of “Practical Music Education Technology”. She was the recipient of the 2016 TI:ME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year Award.
Peter Perry is the author of “Technology Tips for Ensemble Teachers.” He received the Brent Cannon Music Education Alumni Achievement Award from Kappa Kappa Psi, recognizing outstanding contributions to secondary music education; the Presidential Scholar Teacher Award; and a Japan Fulbright fellowship. He is in his 25th year as Instrumental Music Director at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland and is on the music education faculty of the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.
Will Kuhn joins the show to talk about Apple's new Macs, teaching electronic music, home automation, and his forthcoming book, Electronic Music School.
Show Notes:
We recorded this episode right after last weeks Apple event! People have now used and reviewed these machines! I recommend this one, this one, and this one.
Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.
Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple's relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.
I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.
I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.
I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!
Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn't exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple's vision for an "app-centric" model were the norm instead of the "web-centric" model we have now.
Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.
Google Meet continues its onslaught of pre-announced features today with the launch of custom backgrounds during video calls. This customization is a staple of modern conferencing apps, and one that helps convey “more of your personality.”
Another Google Meet feature playing catchup with Zoom. This has started rolling out in my school district but I don’t have the option in my account yet.
From what I have seen other students do, it appears to work as expected, maybe slightly less consistent at detecting the edges of a person than Zoom is.
Many of Google Meet’s “catchup” features of the past few months have been buggy, though I think I prefer them being this aggressive with updates than to drag their feet.
It will be interesting to see what Google can do with Meet that is actually unique to their companies strengths. The pandemic caught them by surprise and they have been rushing to keep up with the success of Zoom.
Google has always had too many communication apps, and has never seemed to know what to do with them (Google Hangouts, Duo, Allo, and a bunch of others that have been killed off). Google has a lot of potential with Meet and seems to be focusing on it with more intent since the pandemic forced many to work line.
Google has an education platform to rest on which Zoom doesn’t have. It would be interesting to see them make a move that better integrated Meet with Google Classroom and Docs. Hopefully, we will see them continue to focus on rapid development in the coming months, even after they have ”caught up” with many of Zoom’s popular features.
