Expand Your Keystrokes And Save Hours: Using TextExpander In The Middle School Band Classroom

It is not uncommon that colleagues of mine ask for advice on what new and useful apps are out there. When they do, I find it difficult to persuade them to experiment with paid apps, especially when there are dozens of free, though lesser quality, versions on the App Store that accomplish similar tasks.

An example of a paid app that I have long advocated for is TextExpander. This app is available for OSX and iOS, but the Mac version is the one I cannot live without.

TextExpander allows users to create custom snippets of text that expand into larger bodies of text upon entry. For example, I have set it up so that typing “haddress” generates my home address. Typing “pemail” generates my personal email address. The process works kind of like autocorrect, only the entry and result can be customized however I want. See below for an example of the TextExpander app, complete with my library of snippets.

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By the way, this feature is already available to all Mac users in the keyboard settings in the System Preferences (see below).

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Don't let that stop you from trying TextExpander, though. It is far more powerful than the feature built into OSX. For example, TextExpander can expand dynamic data. I can type “ddate” and it will fill in the current date like so: October 1, 2014. “Ttime” does the same thing for the current time. I save hours a year abbreviating these items rather than stopping to think while I carefully type them out.

There are plenty of TextExpander gurus writing on the subject already (see the bottom of this post for a few of them) so I have determined that if I have anything to add, it would be to share a few ways I am using it in the middle school band classroom.

Instruments, Ensemble Names, Materials, Email Signatures

This might seem crazy, but I have created a shorthand for every instrument, ensemble name, and method book I type on a regular basis. The 20th time a parent asks me what book their 7th grade percussionist needs to buy for band class, I get a little tired of typing out Intermediate Snare Drum Studies, not to mention the same email response every time. Instead, I abbreviate all of my book titles and add an “x” before them to make sure I don’t accidentally trigger TextExpander when typing something else. For example, Intermediate Snare Drum Studies becomes “xisds” and Hal Leonard Intermediate Band Method becomes “xhlmb.” I save time typing instrument names by replacing words like “baritone saxophone,” “euphonium,” and “bass drum” with “xbsax,” “xeuph,” and “xbd.” Ensemble names are especially frustrating to type, and I type them a lot. “Symphonic Band” becomes “xsb” and “Concert Band” become “xcb.” Don’t forget your email signature. For me, “wsig” expands my work signature:

Robby Burns

Director of Bands

Lake Elkhorn Middle School lakeelkhornband.org

HTML

This next idea is not entirely specific to being a band director. However, if you are teaching, chances are you have a website. And if you have ever wanted to have a tiny bit of control over the contents of your site, chances are you have learned a little bit of HTML. Even if you have some basic HTML memorized, it can be a pain to type. I have a string of HTML I type every time I post an audio or video file to my personal website. Typing out all the HTML looks something like this:

<video src="http://robbyburns.com/assets/video/three-transformations3.mp4" width="640" height="360"></video> <dl class="separator"> <dt>Composer</dt> <dd>Andrew Thomas</dd> <dt>Performers</dt> <dd>Robby Burns (Marimba); Anna Viviano (Marimba)</dd> </dl> <p class="box-info">Performed in Ulrich Recital Hall at The University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.</p> <a href="http://youtu.be/Ek7NwgMvKg4"><img src="http://robbyburns.com/assets/img/icon- youtube.png"></a>

It is so much easier to enter this string of text with TextExpander. All I need to type in my blog post is “audiopost” and TextExpander writes all of that code out for me.

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Automated Emails

I deal with about 90 kids on a regular basis. I am responsible for teaching all of them, and therefore, maintaining informative and supportive relationships with their parents. Keeping parents informed when half of them are asking me very similar questions throughout the week can be tedious and frustrating.

I recently started creating TextExpander snippets for these interactions. Often, parents ask about my weekly playing chart assignment. I typically organize my response to these questions in the same way, so I decided to create a snippet, “xpchart,” that expands the following:

Dear ——"

Thank you for asking about the Playing Chart. The Playing Chart is a reflection of the actual practice that students do throughout the week. Though I will assign various different exercises, warm ups, and concert music to be practiced throughout the year, the “Homework” part of the grade is from the Playing Chart itself, which is a reflection of the practice.

Each student is to practice three times for ten minutes a day. I consider the letter “A” to represent ten minutes of warm-up activities. Letter “B” stands for exercises, etudes, and other melodies from the method book. Letter “C” represents concert music. When each of these tasks is worked on during a night of practice, the student will check off that letter on the chart. When the week is over, a parent signs the chart and the student turns it in during sectionals the following week.

More information about practice expectations and a downloadable copy of the Playing Chart can be found at www.lakeelkhornband.org/practice/

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any other questions.

Mr. Burns

While I like to think my rehearsal timing is air tight, students get let out late on occasion. Class transitions are chaotic but I still like to take the time to immediately tell the staff that these students are excused to their next class. It only takes a couple of taps on the iPad or Mac to send the following email to the staff using the abbreviation “xlate” in the body of the message:

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Notice some funny text appearing in the middle of that message. This is another fantastic feature of TextExpander. When I type in an abbreviation, I can choose to have TextExpander show a pop up window with some fill-in fields before it expands the text. In this case, I want the email to reflect the class I am sending out late and the amount of minutes late they can be excused. See what this process looks like below. It seems like multiple steps, but it is really just a few keystrokes.

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The custom controls that allow me to create this pop up window can be viewed by clicking on the cursor icon and selecting “Pop-Up Menu.” All of the other dynamic text options can be discovered in that same menu.

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Note that I tend to describe these messages as “automated” when I send them. Even though they are not, I like to put something in there that lends itself to the generic tone of the email.

Automating Sub Plans

Speaking of the fillable form snippets, I have a great one that automatically generates sub plans for me based off a DVD series I use frequently. My school owns Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts series. It is perhaps personal preference, but I am not a big fan of letting my students play their instruments while I am out. I won’t advocate that viewpoint here, but let’s just say I tend to lean on the side of using videos when I am out. The snippet “xsubplans” brings up a pop up menu, allowing me to choose the DVD number and chapter, and type some reflection questions in the larger text field. When this snippet is entered into a word processor, I have an instant template for a sub plan involving one of the videos from this series.

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Where to Learn More

I hope this attempt to detail some of the practical uses of TextExpander will inspire a few of my colleagues to give it a chance. You can try it free by clicking here where you can also purchase for $34.95. Smile, the developers of this app, also just released a keyboard app for iOS that will allow you to use these snippets on your iPhone or iPad. Your library of snippets can sync over Dropbox so there is no need to worry about keeping them up to date.

To learn more about the features of TextExpander, check out their website here and their tutorials here. For great examples of how snippets can be used in a powerful way (and some downloadable sample snippets to embellish your library), check out MacSparky and Brett Terpstra’s websites.

Feel free to contact me at robby@robbyburns.com if you have any questions.

iPads, Chromebooks, and the responsibilities of the post-PC educator

Below, I share some thoughts on the recent article in The Atlantic about why some schools are selling their iPads. Click here to read the article.

I was always skeptical of how quickly schools adopted iPads on a large scale. While they are easy to adapt as teacher tools for organization, proper training is necessary before they are put in the hands of an entire classroom. Generally speaking, educators are behind the times when it comes to technology because of how long it takes to organize and implement new hardware and curriculum. The iPad’s potential got hyped back in 2010 and though I know there are situations in which they are engaging kids, my experience tells me that many administrators are buying them out of the excitement of being seen as “technological” and telling interested teachers to just go right ahead without any plan how to enhance existing learning.

The examples in The Atlantic suggest some excellent points about the productivity of tablets vs. laptops. The idea that kids see tablets as “fun” devices and computers as “work” is of central interest to me. I wonder if American adults were surveyed, if the majority would say that their iPad is a reading, web browsing and light gaming device, or instead, that it is primarily used for email, documents and professional software. I use mine for both. However, I find myself leaving it at home from time to time. Though tablets are both productive and mobile, they are also playgrounds of varying different activities and amusements. I soon learned, for example, that if I wanted to get any serious reading done, I had to bring my plain old Kindle on the go instead of using the Kindle app on iPad where I would constantly get distracted by email, text messages and game notifications. For getting “real” work done, my Mac has the software features and keyboard for getting it done faster. Of course, I have seen many examples of iPads used in the classroom where it seemed the teacher intended them to be used as a fun gimmick rather than a tool for engagement or productivity, but that is a criticism for another post.

The question I raise is: do we as educators have a responsibility towards teaching students to manage the distractions that come with the utility of modern technology? Or do we “edit” real life, making school less like the real world but one in which getting positive results out of children is more immediate? I am talking about editing the classroom in the same way, for example, elementary school children get in line to travel down the hall or band directors give donuts to the section who has 100 percent sectional attendance. I understand why Chromebooks are favored in the examples in The Atlantic. There is something organized and concrete about putting your device in “listening mode” where it has to be in an objectively fixed position and no distractions can get through. I get it, but if we are truly living in a post-PC world, do kids need to learn how to cope with the distractions of a tablet as much as they did the inconveniences of a PC years ago?

As for IT management, Chromebooks make total sense. While I have known Google devices to be far more frustrating to manage for IT departments due to their open source nature, when kids are using apps as basic as Google Docs, the cloud is the perfect place to work. The nature of Google apps, Docs in particular, is to function entirely on the web. There are no software hassles, disk space shortages, or any of these other traditional “computer-y” ideas. Apple has to step up here. They are catching up, but I still have to think a little too hard about what is happening to a document when I save it to the cloud on a Mac or iPad. Google’s simple approach is a huge asset for students to share work with teachers and making sure that there are fewer management problems on the student end.

Chromebooks have appeared useless to me due to their limitations, but it seems these limitations are an advantage with large numbers of students in the classroom. I am interested to see if there is continued iPad fallout in the coming years or instead, an establishment of how post-PC devices are valued in education.

Sarah Jarosz at Rams Head On Stage, March 12, 2014

I had the pleasure of seeing Sarah Jarosz perform at Rams Head On Stage on March 12th, 2014.

Though her most recent album, Build Me Up From Bones, features a moderate range of instrumentation, Jarosz does most of her touring with only a trio consisting of herself on banjo/guitar/mandolin, Nathaniel Smith on cello and Alex Hargreaves on fiddle.

The trios’ arrangements of Jarosz’s repertoire were superbly balanced, each musician lending the right ammount of simplicity or density to the ensemble at every moment. Basically speaking, the more instruments on stage, the more varying combinations of color, volume, texture and blend I expect a band to posses. However small, Jarosz’s trio was able to imply much wider contrasts in these respects than are possible by the average trio. These subtleties were heard in the progression of form within each song as well as the progression of the set from song to song. For example, when Jarosz accompanies herself on solo guitar for a few tunes, or is accompanied by lone cello on another, the same dramatic intimacy is achieved that you might expect if the singer of a 10 piece band had just stepped into the spotlight for a solo number.

Jarosz and Hargreaves performed their instruments confidently but stuck close to traditional bluegrass techniques. In fact, all of the band members perforformances, particulary their solos, felt comfortably rehearsed but never giving off the feeling of coldness.

Smith on cello did much to bring this instrumentation to life though he never unbalanced the groups dynamic. I figured a cello would stand out for its novel use in a bluegrass band but I was impressed at the uniquely tailored approach Smith brought to the ensemble. He has mastered the ability to replicate and replace the stylistic traits of other bluegrass instruments, some of which not even present in the lineup. At times he played it like a violin, often like a bass, and most impressively, like a guitar. It never felt like he was a cellist in a bluegrass band. He was an entity of his own, not an instrument, but a deliverer of stylistic function. His furious bowing kept him busy as he perfectly gave his instrument the same phrasing as a rhythm guitar going “chick-chicka-chicka-chicka.” He extends his guitar bowings to fiddle riffs, sneaking in dark, warm pizzicato tones, creating the illusion that they are not missing the presence of an upright bass. Smith streamed in and out of these various playing styles, even many times within the confines of a single musical phrase. I was impressed.

Sarah Jarosz surprised me with her ability to finger pick bluegrass licks on all the instruments she played. Even if she had only played rhythm guitar, I would have commended her for her stellar pocket. As for her singing style and personality, they were both invitingly plain.

I highly recommend checking out this trio if they perform near you.

Sibelius 7.5

Read blog post here.

I am disappointed to see what Avid has done with Sibelius over the past few years. In my opinion, 7.5 does not appear feature heavy enough for a paid upgrade, but I guess they have to pay the bills. What is upsetting is that they have apparently been slow on development partly due to their concentration on the iPad app, Scorch, which dropped years ago. It has always been a clunky mess and hasn’t seen many decent updates since its release. On a side note, I wonder how long it will take to get iCloud support for saving PDF and .sib files. Syncing between Sibelius on Mac and Scorch on iPad would be a dream and might convince me to stick with Sibelius for the foreseeable future.

The Sibelius 6 interface was simple and smooth with lots of power behind it.

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The 7 interface is a clunky, hideous, purple disaster. Why Avid would borrow the style of Microsoft Office’s 2010 ribbon interface, I don’t know, but I hope Sibelius 8 brings some fresh change.

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In the meantime, I can’t wait to see what these guys turn out in the next few years.

City on Cilt album, Sidewalk Empires, released today.

My electric rock ensemble, City on Silt, released out album, Sidewalk Empires, today.

You can listen to and pick up a copy of the album at any of the following places…

Spotify

iTunes Store

Google Play

Bandcamp

Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana- Mehliana: Taming the Dragon

Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana succeed in blending the most sophisticated trends in electronic music with a welcome bend towards the complexities of modern jazz. I have heard jazzers experiment with hip-hop grooves and drum samples. I have heard electronic tracks that feature modal progressions on electric keyboards and stuttered swing beats. The difference is that “Mehliana” is not afraid to explore both languages deeply. I hope this is the beginning of an emerging trend- that more practiced improvisers will not be afraid to get down and dirty with drumming that implies crude percussive samples and keyboarding that includes the colorful range of the modern synthesizer.

The first track of Taming the Dragon starts with Mehldau narrating the events of a strange dream. The synthpad-backing alternates between major and minor qualities, paralleling the speaker’s effort to uncover the meaning of his dream. Frustrating bursts of synth-funk break the story, followed by ascending key changes as the speaker approaches enlightenment. The narrative’s colloquialisms contrast with Mehldau’s musical sophistication which boldly suggests the depths of weirdness to which he is willing to travel for the next hour.

The track “Luxe”, represents much of what this album is about. Beyond its delayed rhodes, un-balanced bass phrasing and insistently syncopated drums, a familiar harmonic language can be unearthed. When Mehldau begins to improvise with a sawthoothy synth lead, he solos just like he would behind an acoustic piano, often driving his melody in and out of bitonality with furious lines that will leave your ability to breathe suspended for moments after his phrases are resolved. Speaking of sawtooth leads, they allow Mehldau to explore sustain differently. His improvisations have always balanced space and rhythm tastefully but here he opens up, indulging in the synthesizer’s ability to statically grind on longer notes rather than letting them thoughtfully decay as he might on a piano. When Mehldau does favor acoustic piano as a solo voice, it comes with layers of synth timbres and densely syncopated drum textures stacked on top.

Underneath the chaos, Mehldau’s vocabulary is often contemplative. In my listening experience, hearing his musical voice exposed through all of the complexity is what taming the dragon is all about (although I think “Mehliana” had a different theme in mind). Sometimes Mehldau clears away the layers in moments of intimate solo piano. At other times, it is important to welcome the madness as a characteristic of both experimental electronic music and modern jazz to hear that Mehldau is saying a lot of the same things musically that he does in his other works. If this electric groove infused re-skin of Mehldau’s’ usual sound is the album’s only accomplishment, it is reason alone to enjoy.

🗒 Session Notes: Presenting at the MMEA Conference on Feb. 22

Tomorrow, I will be presenting two morning sessions at the MMEA Conference. One session is called Mac Pro Tips and the other is called Using a Tablet in the Classroom. You can read more about them by clicking here. Notes and presentations from each of these sessions are attached to this website in the news feed in the two posts directly below this one. These notes are dynamic and will automatically update when I edit them. They can be viewed online or saved to your computer using the free note taking software, Evernote.

🗒 Mac Pro Tips Session Notes

Click here to see the session notes.

🗒 Tablet in the Classroom Session Notes

Click here to view the notes. Download links to a PDF and PowerPoint of the presentation are in the notes.