mindnode

Practicing Mindmap - Andy Bliss

Andy Bliss is a brilliant musician who knows how to use his tech tools to work through an idea. I loved this recent blog post of his. It is all about structuring practice methodically. Be sure to click the link and read the entire post. (He turned out a really neat MindNode mindmap in the process of thinking this idea through.)

Practicing Mindmap — Andy Bliss

Practicing is very much an iceberg-meme situation; much of the work is underwater and in preparation phases — before we are ever in the room with the instrument.

Fall always represents a return to this methodology for me. My primary goal with my first year university students is to establish practice habits - a healthy balance, great strategies, and supportive, compounding methods for growth.

The Prime Directive, featuring Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein (Music Ed Tech Talk Podcast #32)

Description

Ethan and Will join the show to talk about their book Electronic Music School, the Prime Directive, writing apps, and the future of the iPad.

Thanks to this week's sponsor, the DMV Percussion Academy. Leran more and registere here.

Chapters:

  • 00:00:00 - Intro
  • 00:01:25 - Sponsor: DMV Percussion Academy
  • 00:02:03 - Star Trek
  • 00:04:18 - Electronic Music School
  • 00:10:09 - Teaching Underlying Musical Concepts of Electronic Music Styles
  • 00:18:33 - Perceived Threat by Traditional Performing Arts Teachers
  • 00:24:28 - Teaching Songwriting
  • 00:27:23 - Scaffolding
  • 00:37:15 - Fighting Racism with Music Education
  • 00:48:37 - The Prime Directive
  • 00:52:34 - Staying Relevant?
  • 01:07:15 - We Live on Twitter
  • 01:07:15 - Writing Apps
  • 01:13:21 - Bedtime
  • 01:16:07 - The M1 iPad Pro
  • 01:35:51 - Tech Tip of the Week
  • 01:38:14 - Album of the Week
  • 01:41:07 - App of the Week
  • 01:43:24 - Closing

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby - Tot
Will - In Haler Radio
Ethan - Figure

Album of the Week:
Robby - Tauk - Shapeshifter II: Outbreak
Will - Suburban Lawns - Janitor (Original Video)
Ethan - Clipping - The Deep

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Will - Twitter | Website
Ethan - Twitter | Website

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

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➡️Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators - Apps to Help You Organize and Plan (NAfME Blog)

This blog post originally appeared on the blog for the National Association for Music Educators (nafme.org) on January 20, 2021.

Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators - Apps to Help You Organize and Plan:

What are your teaching goals for 2021? These apps will help you organize your plan and your time.

Every January, we reflect on our dreams for the coming year. For many, this might include some personal goals like spending more time reading or exercising. For others, it may take the form of professional and instructional goals.

There are innumerable tech tools that can help you with this process, whether it includes brainstorming your big ideas, reflecting on your progress, managing your time, or breaking big ideas into smaller and more actionable tasks.

Look at the Big Picture, Make a Plan

Whether you are the kind of person who likes to do a big brain dump at the beginning of a new year or someone who wants to reflect in a journal, check out these essentials.

MindNode

MindNodeThe user interface of MindNode.

MindNode is a mind mapping application for iOS and macOS. It allows you to create charts that start with a central theme, or "node," and then branch out into other nodes in a hierarchical fashion that is non-linear enough to support the flow of the human mind.

It's easy to think that drawing out a map like this is easier with paper and pen. MindNode makes the process easier than paper, whether your preferred input is by touch, keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. The benefit of making one of these maps on a computer is that you can quickly draw connections from one node to the next, and the software understands these connections. If I drag one of my nodes from one side of the map to the other, all of the other nodes will smartly adjust themselves, so the map looks balanced.

drag and dropDragging around nodes is buttery smooth.

Nodes can also contain various themes, styles, and graphics. You can tag nodes with a keyword and also edit in a linear outline instead of a map. Nodes can be turned into checkable to-dos, and you can export your entire map to a task app like Things or OmniFocus.

editing toolsMindNode's outline mode, clip art, and design editing tools.

If you are on Windows, Android, or are looking for alternative options to MindNode, check out these options:

DayOne

DayOne is an elegant and fully featured journaling app for iOS and macOS that can handle it all. It allows you to create journal entries based on text, photos, or voice memos. You categorize your journal entries by tagging them with keywords or putting them into separate journals. Entries sync across all of your devices.

rehearsal journalOne of the many things I use a journal for is for reflecting on each rehearsal and deciding where I want my focus to be in the following class. calendarOrganizing DayOne entries by image, calendar, event, and other media types.

Some great alternatives include:

I appreciate that DayOne has a calendar and media-centric way of letting you view your entries. If you are someone who does add photos, your content will feel interactive and quick to find.

"Manage" Your Tasks Instead of Drowning in Them

Learn a Task Management App

OmniFocus ForecastThe OmniFocus Forecast view shows me only the tasks that are relevant to a selected day.

You may be familiar with the to-do app on your phone. Some of the most notable are Reminders and Google Keep.

These apps are a great start, but you might find that the alternatives below to be more powerful and flexible. Teachers have our hands full. We need tools that allow us to capture our thoughts the moment we have them, and I am not talking about post-it notes all over your laptop. The following apps all have options for adding tasks to your to-do app in one (or less) taps and feature robust organizing tools like projects, tags, saved search.

OmniFocus InboxThe OmniFocus Inbox.

OmniFocus is my digital brain. On my laptop, I hold the control key plus the spacebar to add a task, even if the app isn't running in the foreground, to quickly enter a thought as it comes to me. On my phone, I can use my voice assistant or the widget on my home screen to quickly capture ideas. My favorite feature is maildrop. OmniFocus provides me with a unique email address I can forward emails towards that will send them to my OmniFocus inbox, with the subject line as the task and the message's body as an attached note. This helps me get those actionable emails that don't require a response out from my mail app and into a to-do list where I can snooze them for when they are relevant. Sanity achieved!

organizing tasksOrganizing Tasks by Project.

Once they are in the database, they go into an inbox to organize them with projects, tags, start dates, and due dates. Start and due dates are crucial for me in a task app. I use the Forecast view in OmniFocus to see what tasks I want to be working on for a given day and which ones are due. I provide due dates only to tasks that I cannot survive the day without doing. This means that I am less often overwhelmed when all of the tasks turn red and overdue items clutter my view of what is important. OmniFocus also supports project templates.

I have templates for concerts, field trips, band adjudication, teaching new repertoire, running my district's Middle School Honor Band, and more. When I create a project from one of these templates, I can even set up the start and due dates relative to an event.

For example, when I tell OmniFocus the date of a winter concert, the task "pack tuba into the car" doesn't show up on my radar until a few hours before I leave for the venue. The task "write concert program" shows up numerous days early.

The fact that I can view things by project, due date, a tag, or a custom perspective means that once I organize them, I can view them from different angles where I am focused on only what is relevant at a given time, place, mental state, or context.

If you are looking for a little more power than the standard Reminder app on your phone, and want something more straightforward and elegant, try Things by Cultured Code. Both apps are based heavily on the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen, which has helped to shape how I manage the projects in my life.

OmniFocus is available for iOS, macOS, and on the web. Most of the apps I listed above have similar features.

If you are just starting out with task management, I recommend Todoist. It has a free option, is available on all platforms, including the web, and has most of the features you could expect from a to-do app (no start dates, though). Todoist also features collaboration! This means you can share a project with other users on your music team or staff and share tasks with one another for ultimate transparency and teamwork.

Project Collaboration and digital organizationTodoist Project Collaboration.

If you want to learn more about how I manage my time as a music teacher using to-do apps and complementary software, check out this video.

Whatever task app you settle on, make sure it has the features you need. Dr. Frank Buck (productivity consultant, retired band director, and administrator) refers to his top features like the Essential 7:

  1. "Due date" field and ability to sort by due date
  2. Repeating tasks
  3. Note section for each task to house supporting information
  4. Search feature
  5. Communicates with your email
  6. Syncs across all devices
  7. Voice input

*I actually do use a paper journal called The Theme System journal, primarily because I believe that New Year's resolutions are usually too concrete or too vague as to be fulfilled.

Planning Band Rehearsals with MindNode, A Mind Mapping App for macOS and iOS

I am starting my third week of paternity leave tomorrow. And while I am doing my best to ignore work at all costs, I am also reminded that when I return I will have three weeks with my students to work on their band assessment music. My long term sub (who is incredible) will have been working on it with them for three weeks by the time I return. Naturally, there is still a lot I want to accomplish with it on my own time.

To that end, I decided to get organized. When I organize large projects, I like to create a mind map.

In my brain, there are a lot of ways I want to keep kids engaged with our current repertoire. I have score study and lesson planning tasks, music and videos I want to inspire them with, strategies for rehearsal, alongside stories and verbal illustrations to communicate abstract tonal and phrasing ideas. I also have some behavioral concerns that need to get locked down so that our focus is at 100 percent. Personally, I don’t know any way to dump out these interconnected ideas and see how they fit together without a map.

IMG_2526.png

MindNode is a mind mapping application for iOS and macOS that lets you easily dump ideas quickly into a beautifully structured map. A MindNode document starts with a single bubble in the middle of the screen from which you can create “nodes,” or branches, off from the middle. It is possible to create a vast tree of hierarchical concepts, topics, and ideas, without even taking your hands off the keyboard, much like typing a quick bullet point list into a note.

The nodes can later be dragged around freely anywhere on the map. When you move one branch, all of the others adjust around it dynamically, ensuring that your map is balanced.

Dragging a node adjusts the map.

Dragging a node adjusts the map.

MindNode has a ton of features that are beyond the scope of this post. You can add notes, images, and tasks to nodes, which you can see I have done in the map above. You can apply various different themes to the way the nodes look, or even customize your own theme. You can also view your map as a linear outline. The new version, MindNode 7 has even just added a visual tagging feature to help you better organize your nodes. You can read about that here.

MindNode is full of tools to conceptualize your map and format it so that it looks great.

MindNode is full of tools to conceptualize your map and format it so that it looks great.

One of my favorite new features is the Apple Pencil support. When you screenshot a mind map you can choose to annotate it like a normal screenshot or you can select 'Full Page' and MindNode will fit the entire document into view and cut out all of the user interface elements like menus and buttons. This way, you can mark up a clean copy of the file which you can then export as a PDF to an app of your choice.

This is what annotating a normal screenshot looks like.

This is what annotating a normal screenshot looks like.

MindNode uses Apple's PencilKit API to strip away buttons and menus, leaving you with a clean document to annotate.

MindNode uses Apple's PencilKit API to strip away buttons and menus, leaving you with a clean document to annotate.

MindNode's export tools are amazing. In the next screenshot, you can see all of the options. You can export the document itself as an image, PDF, or outline, just to name a few choices. But what I love is the option to export the nodes to the task manager OmniFocus or Things as a project.

IMG_2525.png

Next, you can see a screenshot of Apple Notes with an exported MindNode PDF (left) alongside todo app Things (right). MindNode has neatly formatted my map as a project in Things with headings and checkable todos that I can later give due dates and deadlines too. Awesome!

IMG_2527.png

In that screenshot, notice another PDF beneath my MindNode document. It is another PDF I exported. It is a score map of Greenwillow Portrait by Mark Williams which I am performing with one of the bands.

One of my goals for the quarter is to spend more time in the score. I like to occasionally study a score starting with the big picture and later moving to finer details. To help establish this big picture, I will occationally make a map that serves as a rough guide to a piece. One of my problems with drawing maps is running out of screen space on any of the four ends of the iPad. To solve this, I used Concepts, an open canvas drawing app.

It's full of features, but I am most attracted to the style of the pen tools and its ability to keep drawing in any direction, without being limited by the four walls of the iPad's screen. The document just keeps adding room to whichever side I keep drawing on. It's worth checking out if you have a need for this kind of drawing tool.

When I started this document, I ran out of room on the side of the screen at measure 19. All I needed to do to solve that problem is zoom out and keep drawing.

When I started this document, I ran out of room on the side of the screen at measure 19. All I needed to do to solve that problem is zoom out and keep drawing.

Happy winter and good luck preparing for your spring assessments if you are taking a performing group to one!

🔀 Guest post: 10 Productivity Apps to Help You Organize Your Lesson Plans | Midnight Music

This month I wrote a guest post for Midnight Music, an awesome blog and website designed to equip music teachers with technology knowledge and resources.

The post includes about 10 of the productivity apps I use to create, organize, and collaborate on lesson plans in the music classroom. The list covers some of the web tools and native iOS/Mac apps that are most indispensable to my work as a teacher.

Click the link below to head on over to Midnight Music and read the whole thing.

10 Productivity Apps to Help You Organize Your Lesson Plans | Midnight Music:

Everyone likes to organize themselves differently. Teachers prefer different tools, organization methods, and preference over how much of their workflow is digital. Whatever your approach, there are a handful of great apps that can help you create your plans, search them, group them, and collaborate on them. The following apps are some of my favorite tools for managing lesson ideas, plans and resources.

Many of them have similar features as one another, but all of them have unique strengths. My philosophy is that there is always a better and more specific tool for the job.

🔗 Omni Apps are Adopting Apple’s Standard iOS Document Browser this Fall

Adopting Apple’s Standard iOS Document Browser - The Omni Group

In 2019, we think it’s time to retire our custom document browser in favor of using Apple’s built-in document browser—and with our iOS 13 updates this fall we’ll be doing just that. Instead of seeing our custom file browser, you’ll be presented with the standard iOS document browser—just like in Apple’s own iWork apps. Using Apple’s browser, you’ll be able to store and sync your documents using Apple’s built-in iCloud Drive, or third-party commercial options like Box—or even in cloud- or self-hosted collaborative git repositories using Working Copy.

As a user of OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner, I am grateful that the OmniGroup is making this change. The Files app on iPad works very similarly to the Finder on Mac these days. So when I open or save a document on an iPad, I want to see that same interface. It's exactly the same as if I were on a Mac. I would never go to the File-->Open menu and expect to see anything other than the traditional Save/Open dialogue box that I see for every other app. This is standard on Mac. (Mostly. Some apps like Microsoft Office still refuse to use it.) So it is only fitting that in iOS, document based apps display the system provided interface for interacting with files.

In apps like Pages, for example, opening a new document displays an interface that looks and behaves like the Files app.

In apps like Pages, for example, opening a new document displays an interface that looks and behaves like the Files app.

MindNode is an example of a third party app that uses the same Files interface as Apple’s own apps.

MindNode is an example of a third party app that uses the same Files interface as Apple’s own apps.

Apps like OmniOutliner show a custom interface. Fortunately, OmniGroup is changing this behavior in the fall.

Apps like OmniOutliner show a custom interface. Fortunately, OmniGroup is changing this behavior in the fall.

PDF Expert is another example of an app that does not use the native file picker. Hopefully they will get the message and adopt it soon.

PDF Expert is another example of an app that does not use the native file picker. Hopefully they will get the message and adopt it soon.