The school year is finally over, as is my first ever quarter of online teaching.
I wanted my students to end the year seeing themselves represented together, playing the same music, at the same time. So I sharpened my Final Cut skills and dove into the process of making a virtual ensemble.
The video in this post gives an overview of my process for making these videos, all the way from making a play along track, to advanced editing such as pitch and rhythm correction. The video includes a couple of my favorite Mac utilities for manipulating audio and video files. Scroll to the bottom to see all of the final videos of my students.
A swift return to the show from Craig McClellan to talk about all of the things Apple announced at their developer conference this past week and how we see it influencing our work.
Here is the first of a few "virtual band" videos I have been editing over the past few weeks. I am proud of my students for their hard work in unfamiliar conditions. I enjoyed making this a lot, but for different reasons than I enjoy teaching band.
I really refined my audio and video editing workflow for this. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a video post on how I made this using Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and handful of other indie Mac apps.
Robby’s Ellicott Mills Middle School colleague, Ben Denne, joins the show to talk about designing a sequential instrumental music curriculum, and how they track student progress in the FileMaker app. Other topics include:
Workflows for producing virtual band/orchestra videos
The importance of developing audiation in student musicians
The Institute for Composer Diversity is curating special lists from their database, and their first one features wind band music! I am especially excited that this list includes works for beginners, an area that I find it typically challenging to program for. There is a lot of beginning music on this list to pick from.
Required state repertoire lists exist differently in every state in the U.S. and ICD, along with our partners in On The List and many others, wants to help to make sure those solo, chamber, and large ensemble lists appropriately provide students with music from many diverse voices. We’re starting with wind band works, but will grow this project to include choir, orchestra, jazz ensembles, and chamber works!
The lists below comprise a growing list of works for wind band composed or arranged by either a woman composer or a composer/arranger from an underrepresented heritage which have been selected by one or more U.S. state for repertoire lists. K-12 schools are required to perform works from these lists at district-and state-wide band festivals and competitions. Most of these works are in our Works Diversity Database (and those that aren’t will soon be)!
Video editing is easier than it’s ever been, with the barrier to entry becoming less pricey every year. As long as you have some decent footage to work with, you can turn it into something presentable—and dare we say professional—using programs that won’t cost you anything. Here are six of the best free video editors to help you unleash your inner Oscar-winning director.
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.
As much as I love IDAGIO for classical music streaming, it is mostly solving the metadata problem for me. In other words, the issue of being able to sort and filter by time period, composer, conductor, etc.
I still find Apple Music's library for classical to be decent, and I already pay for it.
I am looking forward to trying out Concertino in the coming days.
Transform Apple Music into a magical classical music jukebox - browse composers, genres and periods, create playlists of multi-movement works, start no-nonsense radio stations and much, much more, for free!
