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#67 - Back to School, with Theresa Hoover

Theresa returns to talk about going back to school, research tools and workflows, general productivity, and Obsidian.

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Show Notes:

Additional Places to Find Theresa:

App of the Week: Robby - MarkEdit Theresa - Forest

Album of the Week:
Robby - Nickel Creek: Celebrants Theresa Hoover - GoGo Penguin

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby - Drag the proxy icon on Mac Theresa Hoover - Data vailidation in Google Sheets

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Theresa Hoover - Website

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

Actions for Obsidian Released

You may have heard me talk about the note app Obsidian here a lot over the past year (like for example here, here, or here). I also really like automating my life with the Apple Shortcuts app (which you can read about here, here again, or here).

Obsidian is already very automatable, but using Shortcuts for the job makes everything way easier and less abstract. I am happy to report that there is now an awesome Mac app which adds Obsidian actions to the Shortcuts app.

Actions for Obsidian is the missing link between Obsidian and macOS / iOS. It brings 30+ Shortcuts actions into the Shortcuts app to help bring your notes and automations together. The Mac app is out now and the iOS version is coming soon.

From the developer:

Actions for Obsidian is a macOS application that adds over 30 Shortcuts actions for working with Obsidian notes and vaults, making Obsidian a first-class citizen in Apple's Shortcuts app.

Obsidian is very powerful, and its large community has created hundreds of useful plugins that make working inside an Obsidian vault even more powerful and easier, but there was no integration with macOS and Apple's automation ecosystem until now. Actions for Obsidian adds that integration and makes it easy to bring information from other apps into your notes, or to bring information from your vaults into other apps.

I have been testing the app for a bit now, and it has really cleaned up a lot of my daily workflows.

For example, here is a Shortcut that takes looks at my daily calendar events, creates a note for each of them all in Obsidian, and then preappends my Obsidian Daily Note with links out to all of them so that they are associated with the current day.

That last action in the sequence is provided and made possible by Actions for Obsidian. You can download the app here and get ideas for how to use it in their Workflow Library.

Here is a little sample of what calendar notes look like when embedded in my daily note:

Actions for Obsidian is free to download with a 14 day trial period. It has a "pay what you want pricing" starting at $9.99.

Linking Together Data Across Many Apps using Obsidian and Hookmark

In my recent trip to TMEA, I presented on the topic of my book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers.

There are a lot of different types of data to manage on a computing device. There are notes, tasks, events, words, websites, audio, video, sheet music, and more.

One of the things we discussed in the session is how the move to web-based productivity apps like Google Docs has made it challenging to organize website URLs alongside the documents that are stored locally on a computer.

It can be confusing to keep track of where all of this data is, especially when your different files may be spread across multiple apps and websites, even though they relate to the same subject.

I have been using a PKM app called Obsidian to create "dashboards" where I link this various data together.

Linking URLs to Google Docs is easy enough using copy/paste. But linking to other files that live on my hard drive is tricky.

I have been using the Mac app Hookmark, which solves this very friction. A keyboard shortcut (mine is Control+Command+Spacebar) takes whatever data is in the foreground, generates a link to it, and copies it to the clipboard, where it can be pasted somewhere else.

For example, I can be inside a note or a document I open frequently, invoke Hookmark, and then paste the a URL directly to that file right inside of my Obsidian Dashboard. The Dashboard can therefore include links to websites, notes, documents, and nearly any other kind of data imaginable.

I have a dashboard that matches each large project I have going in OmniFocus (where I manage my tasks). Creating links with Hookmark also allows me to link to specific tasks inside of the dashboard. It goes the other way too. I can link an Obsidian note to the notes field of an OmniFocus task to create better context for my data.

You can learn more about Obsidian in the podcast episode below.

Building a Second (Music Teacher) Brain, with Dr. Cory Meals

Dr. Cory Meals joins the show to talk about building a second brain, personal knowledge management apps, and how to keep it all together!

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Thanks to my sponsors this month, Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks.

Show Notes:

Other Recommendations from Cory, not mentioned in the episode:

App of the Week:

Music of the Week:

Where to Find Us:

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

#47 - Craft for Music Educators, with Dr. David MacDonald

David rejoins the show to talk about how we use Craft, an extremely versatile, elegant, and powerful app for the web, iOS, and macOS devices.

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RSS | Email Newsletter

Subscribe to the Podcast in…

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Support Music Ed Tech Talk

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Buy me a coffee

Show Notes:

App of the Week

Robby - Documents

David - GoodReader

Music of the Week

Robby - NPR Top 50 of 2021

David - Silk Sonic

Tech Tip of the Week

Better Touch Tool

Where to Find Us:

Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book

David - Twitter | Website | Blog

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

METT Episode #42 - Pass the Baton, with Theresa Hoover

There's a new episode of Music Ed Tech Talk out!

Theresa Hoover returns to talk about career changing, COVID practices worth bringing into this school year, productivity apps, and empowering student creativity!

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Subscribe to the Podcast in... Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Support Music Ed Tech Talk

Become a Patron!

Buy me a coffeeBuy me a coffee

Thanks to my sponsors this month, Blink Session Music.

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby - Instapaper / Readwise Theresa - Kumospace

Album of the Week:
Robby - Turbo Theresa - Cory Wong

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby - Safari Tab Groups, Sync Safari and Chrome bookmarks with a Windows PC Theresa - Chrome Reading List / Favicons Favorite Bar

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

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

Find Robby elsewhere on the web