I am taking part in a Panel Discussion called "Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic" this Wednesday, August 5th. It is taking place on the Music Teachers Facebook Group at 8 pm through Zoom.
I will specifically be contributing ideas about practical instruction for performing ensembles. I am planning to discuss everything from large group rehearsal to break-out chamber ensembles, to music scanning apps, and software for assessing student performance.
Some great minds are involved. Here is a description of the panel from the Facebook Event:
Join us for a free online panel discussion with several of your Music Teacher Administrators and Moderators and special guests as we discuss the tools, techniques, and resources to move your music ensembles and music classrooms totally online or to a blended learning hybrid. Panelists include Jim Frankel, CEO of Music First; Katie Wardrobe, Director, Midnight Music Technology Training; Ron Kearns, retired HS band teacher; Tom West Blended Learning Instrumental Music teacher; Robby Burns, MS band teacher; Richard McCready, HS guitar teacher & music ministry; Tiffany Walker, MS band teacher; Krystal Williams, HS band teacher.
If you are interested, you can join the group here. Note: You will not be admitted into the group if you do not answer the questions.
One of the reasons I continue using Apple products is that they work well together. The better the features work across devices, the less often users need third party software to get things done.
Now that iCloud Drive supports the sharing of files and folders, a lot of vocal Mac and iOS users have debated if they can finally let go of Dropbox.
Productivity master, David Sparks, had some things to say about it on his blog this week:
All that said, Dropbox still has many features that sure would be nice in iCloud, like a much better implementation of version history and deletion recovery. I was hoping we would get some more functionality for iCloud Drive this year at WWDC, but we didn’t. I was hoping I could throw Dropbox overboard. One less service and one less thing to pay for sure sounded nice.
For me, the major hole in iCloud Drive is that I cannot control what lives on my hard drive and what stays in the cloud. Both Dropbox and iCloud have a feature where they will smartly try to make this decision for you, uploading files you haven't touched in months to the cloud so that they don't take up hard drive space.
Sometimes I need the control to be able to tell a service to keep a folder or a file permanently downloaded, no matter what. And iCloud Drive still can't do this task.
iCloud folder and file sharing are reliable in my use, but setting up the share is far less intuitive than Dropbox, which presents its options to you with clear iconography when you right-click on a folder or file in the Finder.
Why Apple can't get right what Dropbox figured out over ten years ago still confuses me. Hopefully they will tweak it and make it better.
I am fortunate that my free Dropbox account is large enough that I don't need to pay. iCloud remains my primary storage solution but I keep Dropbox around for miscellaneous purposes, including sharing with others who don't use iCloud.
If you want to use Dropbox on a Mac, but avoid installing it, I recommend the app Transmit. While the app is marketed as an FTP client, it can also act as a Google Drive or Dropbox client, allowing you to upload, download, copy, and share files, using a native macOS experience, and without allowing Dropbox to run in the background.
Until last Sunmer, I hosted the Music Ed Tech Talk podcast here on SquareSpace, as a separate blog page from this one. In August, I moved my podcast to Libsyn but continued to cross post the episodes to that SquareSpace blog so that episodes would have a nice place on the web that looked like it was in a consistent style with the rest of my website.
Having two SquareSpace blogs here seemed redundant. So I have combined the podcast with this blog and now they are both called Music Ed Tech Talk. It will make no difference to readers and listeners. Everything is just under the same hood. Subscribers to the blog will get blog posts each time a publish a podcast episode, containing the show notes and a web player to listen from the web. Listeners to the show can continue to use the same feed to get just the episodes in their podcast player of choice.
If you click Blog in the navigation of my website, or type musicedtechtalk.com, it willl take you here, where you can see all posts and episodes. If you click podcasts in the nav bar, and select Music Ed Tech Talk, it will no longer take you to the old, secondary, blog I was using for the podcast. Now it will take you to this blog, but with the podcast category filtered, so you only see episodes once you scroll below whatever blog post is featured at the top.
I'm not sure if anyone cares about these details except for me, but it sure does feel good not to be posting all of my new podcast episodes to SquareSpace two times. I am leaving the old podcast blog site up because it still gets search hits on the web, but I have de-linked it from this site.
By the way, if you haven't, you should subscribe to the blog and podcast using the appropriate links in the sidebar. You can now subscribe to these posts in a weekly email!
Loopback is an app that creates custom audio ins and outs for the Mac using the audio of other apps.
Have you been teaching a class in Google Meet or Zoom and wanted to play a song from iTunes for your digital classroom? Or perhaps a YouTube video or any other application with audio?
Sure, you can play it right on your computer and let the audio from your speakers go straight back into the microphone input of your computer. This works ok in my opinion. But it isn't going to produce a pure representation of the audio I am trying to send. And in some cases, it creates issues with echo, delay, or a nasty feedback loop.
So what do you do? Rogue Amoeba makes excellent Mac apps that, for lack of better explanation, hack into the audio system of your Mac. I have written about Audio Hijack here before, their app that allows you to record audio from other applications (and that's just the start of all the powerful things it can do). Rogue Amoeba also makes an excellent utility called Loopback.
What does Loopback do? Think about your computer's audio settings. You have an Input and an Output. The Input is, by default, your computer microphone, and the Output is the speakers. If you connect an audio interface that has higher quality microphone and speakers plugged in, you would need to set the Input and Output to that interface to get the input and out put the be the microphone and speakers, respectively.
Usually my computer microphone is a Device that can be set to the computer’s Input. In the scenario above, Loopback has allowed me to combine the audio from my microphone and the Music app into a new audio Device called “Music+Mic” that can be selected as the input of my Mac or any individual app.
Your Inputs and Outputs can be controlled from the Sound settings of your computer. Some audio apps also let you control how, specifically, they behave. For example, I have manually set up GarageBand and Skype to use my audio interface as the Device I use for input so that whether I am recording for my podcast, or simply catching up with a relative, they hear me through the microphone, no matter what Device my Mac’s audio Output is set to in the System Preferences.
Loopback allows you to create Inputs and Outputs that are accessible to your Mac's Sound settings as well as your apps. In the example above, I have created an Input that combines my Mac's microphone (the usual Input) with the output of the Apple Music app, something I might want to use to play a recording example for my students in a Google Meet.
Selecting my new audio Device from the System Preferences.
Look now as I go to my computer's Sound settings, and I can select this new custom Input to be used across the entire operating system! This way, when I am in a Google Meet, students are hearing both me speaking through the mic and all of the output of the Music app.
Now I can route my band warm up tracks, reference recordings, or any other audio I desire, into my Google Meet classrooms.
Now that many teachers are working from home, I have found that managing my environment is key to my sanity. Dark Noise elevates the idea of a noise machine to a premium level, offering a superior user experience and all sorts of power user tools like Siri Shortcuts integrations.
One of my favorite Shortcuts is called Lesson Planning. The shortcut puts my phone in Do Not Disturb mode, starts a time tracker, takes a predetermined sound in Dark Noise, and plays it in a particular AirPlay 2 speaker in my house. For me, that's a Sonos Move speaker in the sun room.
That version of the Shortcut is intended for public use. My personal version of it adds a step to set the hue of the lights in that same room.
The shortcut can be set to go off when I ask Siri, by launching it from a widget, or by even installing it as an app icon on the homescreen. Its never beyond a tap away. My custom phrase is "Hey Siri, I'm working in the sun room."
The new update includes some nice new features. Read this MacStories article for the details:
In Dark Noise 2 not only can you mix different sounds to create custom noises, but there are also eight new sound options to choose from, iCloud sync has been added for syncing your favorite sounds and custom mixes, and there’s optimized support for the iPadOS cursor. It’s a big release that retains the design elegance Dark Noise has had from day one, but expands the app’s usefulness in key ways.
At WWDC, Apple’s software developer conference last month, they announced that the Mac will be moving to the same chip architecture as iOS devices. One of the many benefits of this move will be that iOS apps will run on the Mac natively.
CDM had an interesting immediate reaction to this news.
Apple’s announcement of moving the Mac from Intel to ARM is no surprise. But here are the details most relevant to your tools – and why we’re in a new era on both the PC and the Mac.
And TL:DR – the change on the Mac platform has a lot to do with Apple’s App Store ecosystem and blending the iPad and Mac platforms. But looking at the big picture, we aren’t so much post-PC as post-Intel. All vendors, not just Apple, are starting to eye chips other than Intel’s even on the x64 architecture.
I am really excited about this possibility for a number of reasons. There are a ton of iOS apps I would love to use the Mac (I am looking at you Tonal Energy and forScore). But then I got thinking about how big and diverse the iOS App Store is, and what some of the edge-case effects of iOS apps on the Mac could be.
Let’s think about audio plugins for a moment. iOS doesn’t have a robust architecture for integrating third party audio apps into larger ones like GarageBand. But it does has a lot of these audio apps. My understanding is that iOS plugins are Audio Units with the .AU extension, just like ones you would install in a DAW on MacOS.
So my assumption is that that an audio app for iOS like Brusfri could run inside of Logic alongside all of your other plugins. This may be a bad example considering Brusfri has a Mac version already but you get the idea.
I think this will only help the Mac. It could be mildly disruptive to the audio plugin market because iOS plugins are so much cheaper than things like, for example, Waves but ultimately, people who want Waves will still buy Waves. I am optimistic that this change will simply mean more apps for everyone, more variety of apps, and more variety of price.
The Pages app now supports importing books from iBooks Author, which Apple discontinued and removed from the App Store on July 1. The update app also allows videos from YouTube and Vimeo to be played right in documents, with release notes below.
Play YouTube and Vimeo videos right in your documents.
I have been wishing for this feature for years. Embedding web videos is so useful in the classroom, where adding something like a YouTube video to your class presentation is as easy as pasting a URL to it in a slide.
I have been jealous of Google Slides for this feature (and pretty much only for this feature) and had just assumed that it was easier for Google to implement because both services are web-based. Apple doesn’t have a strong history of going out of their way to cooperate with the web, or Google services for that matter. So I am happy to see this feature here.
I have worked around this problem in the past by using two apps that are incredible utilities. Downie, on the Mac, which strips videos from the web and downloads them to your hard drive, and iCab Mobile, which is a web browser for the iPad that can download web videos to the Files app.
Both these apps, on their respective operating systems, have allowed me the control to download web videos and put them in slides. But this new iWork feature will eliminate several steps and make my files much lighter.
This is the second part in my series on using OmniFocus to stay on top of my teaching responsibilities. My last post, Staying On Top Of Teaching Responsibilities With Omnifocus Perspectives, details how I use custom Perspectives to ensure that I only see the tasks that are relevant to me in particular working contexts. Today, I am going to write about how I use TaskPaper templates to make sure I don’t forget steps of commonly repeated projects.
Why Project Templates?
As a band director, I have tons of repeating projects. There are numerous concerts a year, field trips, musical repertoire to stuff in folders, and substitutes to prepare lessons for. Usually, the tasks in these projects are the same, and have similar due dates relative to the date of the concert, substitute, or trip.
What is TaskPaper?
OmniFocus allows users to write templates for these projects in plain text using a special syntax called TaskPaper. The TaskPaper syntax is what is used by the application by the same name. It allows users to create and maintain complex projects with checkable tasks, each of which containing tags and due dates. There are no buttons or menus, everything is typed without lifting your hands off the keyboard.
A simple project in TaskPaper would use a colon after the title to bolden it and turn it into a project. Tasks are indicated by dashes, followed by spaces. And tags are indicated by an @ symbol. Therefore, a project with sub tasks and tags would look exactly like this...
OmniFocus Projects Templates use this same syntax and have added some custom features through the use of tagging. You can read about that syntax here.
OmniFocus Projects can look as simple as the example text above. But they can also use custom placeholders which prompt you to add dynamic data. If you put a string of characters in between the symbols ‘«’ and ‘»’, OmniFocus will treat it like a variable and prompt you to provide it. This means that if tag an item with the tag @due(«dateofperformance»), I will be asked what the date of the performance is, and then OmniFocus will add that due date to any tasks with that tag.
See my Concert Template below for an example.
Notice that most of my due dates have the minus symbol and a number after them followed by ‘d,’ ‘m,’ or ‘w,’ for days, months, and weeks, respectively. This adjusts the due date relative to the date I provide OmniFocus when prompted. Here is an example. When we perform a concert, the high school we feed into usually offers help from student volunteers in their Tri-M chapter. I need to get in touch with the Tri-M President at least 14 days before the date of the concert to ensure they have enough time to prepare, so I have added a -14d to the end of the date tag for that task. OmniFocus will not bother me about the task until that time.
There is also a Defer date tag associated with that same task. I can begin working on that task up to four weeks before it is due, so OmniFocus reveals it to me four weeks in advance, but doesn’t show it as due until I can’t survive the day without having done it.
Adding Projects to OmniFocus with Drafts
You may be wondering how I am actually triggering these templates to initiate in OmniFocus. As stated above, I am storing them all in Drafts. Drafts has a feature where you can create different workspaces for different buckets of text. I store my templates in the OmniFocus Template Workspace. In the image below, you will see a template for taking my band to their annual Assessment performance.
On the right side of Drafts there are some options which perform custom actions on my drafts. Users can create their own custom actions and share them with the community as Action Groups on the Drafts Action Directory. This particular set of actions was made by the brilliant Rosemary Orchard and shared on her blog here, where she also goes into great detail about using these two applications together.
The actions can be installed directly into Drafts. The topmost action is the one that takes the text of the draft and prompts me to add it to OmniFocus. The other actions along the right side add common TaskPaper syntax to the document wherever you cursor is. For example, tapping the ‘Due’ action will type ‘@due().’ This makes templates more fool-proof as you will be less likely to make a mistake with the syntax.
The image above depicts one of the prompts I receive when running the ‘TaskPaper to OmniFocus’ action in Drafts. Scroll to the top of this post to see what the resulting project looks like once it is in OmniFocus.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
I spend most of my time in the Forecast view of OmniFocus which only shows me tasks that are deferred or due for that day, alongside the events in my calendar. Notice in the screenshot below that I don’t think about the deferred tasks on June 24th until I am actually looking at June 24th, thus allowing me to be calm and focused on other tasks on preceding days.
In my post on OmniFocus Perspectives, I talked about how I can focus my view on tasks that are relevant to certain working contexts. With Project Templates, I can focus on only the tasks that are relevant on certain days. They are otherwise out of sight, out of mind. The due dates ensure that I never miss a task.
This isn’t exactly new news anymore, but I wanted to acknowledge that Claris has launched FileMaker 19.
I spend a lot of time in FileMaker. My colleague, Ben Denne, actually designed a FileMaker app that our music team has collaborated on. The app manages a database of our student's names, a sequential list of all the songs we teach in our classes, concert repertoire, and performance records.
My music team uses FileMaker to track records of student performances. The database calculates total points earned over the course of each student’s middle school career.
The app is able to log instances of student performances and generate points for them that track their progress over the course of their entire three years of middle school. Ben is coming on my podcast, Music Ed Tech Talk later this week to talk about that with me if you want to learn more.
With FileMaker 19, Claris offers their own syncing service, which could significantly cut down costs and increase sync speed for us (two of our major grievances with our current system, which is provided by a third party company.) It also introduces tons of new features that allow users to extend the app. Two that caught my eye are are a deeper support for JavaScript and, finally, Siri Shortcuts actions!
JavaScript is a widely used language. I can imagine huge potential for integrating FileMaker with other apps and web-services. The Siri Shortcuts support, based on five minutes of tinkering, appears to allow users to donate any script from within any one of their FileMaker apps as a Siri Shortcut action. This could be a huge time saver for me, as scripts require a lot of tapping around in menus to run on the current iPad version of FileMaker.
If Shortcuts were to ever allows users to automate actions without requiring a confirmation tap, I can see myself eliminating some tasks that I do at the end of every school day. For example, every day before I pack up my things, I run a script that emails the parents a performance record for every song their child played for me that day, including which points they received on every song.
The move to FileMaker 19 and a new host server would be a lot of work for our music team, but I look forward to investigating the potential.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2020 — Claris International Inc., an Apple subsidiary, today announced the launch of FileMaker 19: the company’s first open platform for developers to rapidly build sophisticated custom apps leveraging direct JavaScript integrations, drag-and-drop add-ons, AI via Apple’s Core ML, and more. Through FileMaker 19, developers can be more productive and businesses can now leverage Claris’ global community of developers, marketplace of add-ons, and existing developer resources to collaboratively solve complex digital problems.
”As cost pressure grows in our rapidly-changing world, companies need to innovate quickly to boost productivity and deliver for their customers,” said Claris CEO Brad Freitag. “That critical agility is at the core of FileMaker 19 as we open the Claris Platform to the most popular programming language on the planet. We’re excited to see what our 50,000 customers will do with a growing set of add-ons and the ability to integrate any of the millions of JavaScript packages."
Teaching is a challenging, multifaceted career. I never end a day feeling like I accomplished everything I was supposed to. But sometimes, software can help! And for my tasks, that software is OmniFocus.
Most of the checkable todo items in my life go in OmniFocus. It is a powerful task app for Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch that is based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. There are 100 reasons I love it. Lately, it’s because I am getting a lot of mileage out of the Perspective feature. Perspectives allow you to build different custom views for how OmniFocus displays your tasks.
The Forecast Perspective comes installed on OmniFocus. It shows you a convenient day at a glance so that you never need to stress about todos until the day they are due.
A Perspective is kind of like a custom search that you can save. The building blocks will seem similar if you have ever made an email rule.
I have over 1,000 tasks in OmniFocus. My goal with Perspectives is to create windows into my work that empower me to think only about the things that are relevant to me at a given time or in a given situation.
Here are a few Perspectives that are most useful to me.
Priority
The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention.
This Perspective shows me all of my most important tasks. I designed it for moments where I have an overwhelming number of things to do spanning numerous unrelated projects and I just need to focus on the things I can’t survive the day (or moment) without doing. This Perspective is set up to show only tasks that are due soon, overdue, and tasks that are both tagged ‘Today’and have a flag. The result is a list of tasks that are due soon mixed in with the most important things I want to be working on ‘today.’
This is how my Priority Perspective is set up.
There are usually only a few tasks that result from this search which helps my eyes (and brain) focus on top priorities.
Today
This is a project that filters only items with the tag ‘Today.’ These items already show up on my Forecast view alongside overdue and due soon items, but there are times where I do not have any items due that day, or where I they aren’t available yet, resulting in a cluttered looking Forecast. The Today Perspective shows me only a list of things I want to be working on Today, organized by project.
This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post.
This is how my Today Perspective is set up.
Deferred
This Perspective shows me when certain items became available to begin working on, in the order that they became available. This is useful for seeing if there are tasks that became available a long time ago that I am really slacking on, or maybe that I need to drop and admit I took on too much.
My Deferred Perspective. Tip - Giving an item a Defer date in OmniFocus means that it isn’t available to work on until that date. You can use these to easily filter only items that are ‘available,’ which can relieve the stress of seeing everything at once.
Teaching
I have numerous projects relating to teaching in the Howard County Public School System. I have action lists for each of my ensembles, for directing the HCPSS Honor Band, for planning concerts, field trips, and for articulating our students from middle to high school. The Teaching Perspective focuses me on only the tasks related to teaching responsibilities, and organizes them by due date. This way I am thinking about only work tasks, while remaining focused on the next task I should be completing.
My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work.
Grading
My school uses Canvas for grading students and Synergy for tracking certain data on them. Both are slow, web-based, programs that take a while to load. For this reason, I tend to want to spend concentrated times working with grades and then ignore them, rather than being constantly in and out of the grade book.
For this reason, I add a lot of grade based tasks to OmniFocus and tag them with keywords like Grades, Canvas, or Synergy. I tend to use these a lot when triaging email. For example, if my school’s data clerk emails teachers with due dates and deadlines for final grades, I forward that into my OmniFocus inbox using my special email address that the app provides. Once it is out of my email inbox and into my OmniFocus inbox I give it a defer date and a due date, and tag it with the tag ‘Canvas.’
Sometimes students email me work if they have issues submitting it on Canvas. Or parents ask me questions in email about certain grades. In these situations, I forward the emails into my OmniFocus inbox and then tag them with the necessary tag.
The Grades Perspective aggregates all of these tags into one view. This is useful because these tasks rarely have hard due dates. By not assigning them due dates, they never clutter up my Forecast perspective (where I spend most of my time). When I am ready to focus on grading, I can open up this Perspective and filter all other tasks out.
The Grades Perspective shows only responsibilities that involve entering grades and working with my school’s learning management software.
Top 3
Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I just need to think “what are three things that I need to focus on today.” This usually happens on days where I need to be spending long periods of serious focus on one or more broad tasks. I often go traditional-task-list and break out a pencil and paper for moments like this. Lately, I use this OmniFocus Perspective called Top 3. I have a tag called “1,” “2,” and “3.” All this Perspective does is filter them so that I don’t see anything else.
Icons
OmniFocus Perspectives can be given a custom icon that matches the style of the perspective icons that come with the app. I am able to make my Perspectives look really attractive and eye-grabbing with the MacStories Perspective Icons, a new product that features 20,000 icons for OmniFocus. You can read more about them and buy them here.
Conclusion
OmniFocus has challenged me to think about my own productivity and capacity to focus. Through Perspectives, I am able to build windows into my work that help me to see only what I need to at a given time.
You can read more about OmniFocus here and learn more about building Perspectives from learnomnifocus.com here.
