Communicating Student Learning Objective data to administrators with fancy Numbers charts

I would like to give a shoutout to Numbers, which remains an essential tool on all my Apple products.

It took minimal clicks to get some really fancy, legible, and engaging charts into my SLO data tracking project for the school year.

Listeners of my podcast will remember Ben Denne and I talking all about our Music Mastery Sequence, and the tool he built to track it. In his more recent podcast appearance, we followed up on this subject, explaining how we have moved away from FileMaker and towards other tools.

My current method for tracking student progress is a giant Numbers spreadsheet with clickable star icons for how many "stars" they earn on each performance. I am using Craft to give students more transparent, informal, and qualitative feedback about what they should be working on.

This same Numbers spreadsheet was able to pump out the above table, graph, and charts. Their graphical nature and intuitive ease allowed me to better understand my own shortcomings in this process and what resources, changes, and school supports I needed to make improvement. This helped me to construct a meaningful narrative in a recent SLO meeting.

I hope to cover Numbers and Craft in greater detail later on down the road, as well as my successes in teaching instrumental music performance at an individualized level. If you want more on this, I certainly recommend the hyperlinked podcast episodes above.

Ben Giroux - Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor: Fuga, J.S. Bach

I love bragging about my past private students, so here is Ben Giroux (Peabody Conservatory - BM Percussion Performance '21, BM Recording Arts and Sciences '22) performing the fugue from Bach's first violin sonata. Ben filmed and edited this video himself. Ben told me it ws ok to leave his email here in case you are in need of videography, live recording, audio, or video editing. Ben is available and can be reached here: GirouxBL99@gmail.com

Midnight Music: 25+ Ways to Use Canva to Create Teaching Resources

Midnight Music has a lot of great content for music educators. One topic I enjoy their coverage of is Canva, a web-based design tool.

Katherine Miller has some tips for using Canva that are worth checking out. Click the link below to read the post.

25+ Ways to Use Canva to Create Teaching Resources:

Being a teacher encompasses so many different skills. Some skills are taught and practiced in our pre-service work while others we have to figure out once we are deep in the trenches of student learning.

One of the skills that didn’t get much attention, at least in my pre-service program, was the practice of design in helping students gain, organize and use information. I understood the importance of design to prepare, present and practice standards that students needed to master but I didn’t have a way to easily do it.

I can remember copying transparencies to project onto paper so I could trace images to make my classroom materials more appealing. I also remember searching through clipart collections to find the perfect addition to digital items I created. And I will never forget making copy after copy to enlarge, reposition or get things to fit just right. Designing materials in my classroom involved lots of magic tape!

Thank goodness that things change! I have learned new skills and new tools, like Canva, have been created to make design as easy as drag and drop!

#53 - Get Organized Digitally! with Dr. Frank Buck

Dr. Frank Buck returns to the show to talk about digital productivity and his new book Get Organized Digitally!

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

Show Notes:

• Recent Dorico episode of Music Ed Tech Talk with Daniel Spreadbury
• musescore 4 Alpha
• Craft update
• Craft episode of Music Ed Tech Talk with Dr. David MacDonald
• Ableton Microtuner Blog Post
• Scala Files
• Audio Hijack 4
• Rogue Amoeba episode of Music Ed Tech Talk with Paul Kafasis
• Dr. Frank Buck's new book: Get Organized Digitally!
• Dr. Frank Buck's other books
• Todoist
• Craft extension for Todoist
• Evernote
• Remember the Milk
• Hook
• Blog post: Never Miss a Task, with OmniFocus Project Templates
• Task apps:
  • Asana
  • Tick Tick
  • Google Tasks
• Spark mail app
• DEVONthink
• OneNote
• TaskClone
• Calendly
• Fantastical
• Cardhop
• TextExpander
• Text Blaze
• Doodle
• Clipboard apps - Alfred / Pastebot / Yoink
• Peek-a-View - app for sharing a limited part of your camera roll with others

App of the Week:
Robby - MaskerAide Dr. Frank Buck - Google Lens

Music of the Week:
Robby - Gabriel Kahane: Magnificent Bird
Dr. Frank Buck - US Marine Band YouTube Channel

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby - Quick Gif with Cleanshot
Dr. Frank Buck - Windows Clipboard History

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Dr. Frank Buck - Twitter | Website

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

Google Docs now supports some Markdown

From The Verge…

# Google Docs now supports limited Markdown. —>

Google is adding Markdown support to Google Docs on the web, letting you format your document using text shortcuts rather than keyboard ones. In a blog post announcing the feature, Google says it’s doing this through its autocorrect feature, so it will automatically format the text for you after you type it in Markdown format. For example, if you type “# Google Docs is getting more Markdown support” it’ll automatically get converted to a level one heading.

Google says that Docs already supported a few Markdown autocorrections for bulleted and numbered lists, and checkboxes. It’s adding much wider support, though — you can now use Markdown to add headings, bold and italicize text (or do both), strikethrough (though it’s done using a - on either side of your content, rather than the traditional ~), and links. That’s a far from complete implementation of Markdown, but at least it covers most of what I personally use the language for.

Markdown is extremely useful and easy to learn because of its natural syntax that doesn’t look like code.

I wrote a little bit about why I use Markdown, and how it can be used to better organize and compose content in Learning Management Software. Read that here.

While Markdown is typically used to compose text documents and web content, it will only make your experience easier if you spend most of your time inside of Google Docs.

I found some of Google’s support documentation on Markdown here.

Pixelmator Pro 2.4 gets an update!

Pixelmator Pro 2.4 was recently released.

You can read more here. This version adds tons of new stuff, including color adjustments and effects layers.

Pixelmator Pro is always my recommendation for people who need a Photoshop-like tool, but without getting a degree in Photoshop or buying a monthly Creative Cloud subscription.

Pixelmator seems like it gets easier to use every update. It’s wild how much power they pack into an interface that is inspired by Photoshop workflows, but immediately accessible anyone who has used a personal computer.

My favorite features of Pixelmator Pro in recent years include:

• One-click machine learning feature which can remove things from the background or foreground, and sharpen low-quality images
• Shortcuts support (which can automatically batch edit images on my computer, generate my podcast show art, and more)
• It’s easy to use interface

Check it out on the Mac App Store.

Dorico 2.2 Out! - features tighter integration with the iPad file system

When Daniel Spreadbury joined the podcast recently he teased the release of "Open in Place” on the iPad version of Dorico. The feature is now out for public use and available on the App Store.

Prior to this release, you could open Dorico projects from the file system of the iPad, but then a duplicate copy was saved inside of the Dorico app, which would not save back to the same location without first exporting that duplicate copy back to the same place, resulting in two copies. With version 2.2 your files stored in the Files app (or your iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive by extension), will open directly from the location you have saved them on another device, and save them back to that location when you close the project. These projects still conveniently appear in the Open Recent page of the Hub when you launch Dorico.

Once opened, Dorico files will generate a thumbnail preview of your project contents, visible right from within the Document Picker.

Open in Place has increased my use of Dorico on iPad immeasurably. On the Mac, I keep my projects in iCloud Drive by default, so now I simply open them from that same location on iPad, edit, and exit out of the project to save it back to the same location.

Syncing has been reliable throughout my testing. Dorico does not recommend having the same file open on two devices at the same time as you may get unintended duplicate copies. As Daniel mentioned in the episode, further iCloud support is coming that will improve Dorico’s handling of this problem, at least if your files are kept in iCloud Drive.

With Split View multitasking, I can now do my favorite workflow on iPad, which is to have forScore opened on one half and Dorico on the other. This allows for me to easily reference my music library when arranging music, recreating parts, or designing practice resources based on the literature.

Recent iPad feature updates have also included Split View multitasking and the ability to preview thumbnails of your scores in the Files or Finder app, which can be previewed using Quick Look. Between “Open in Place,” the multitasking, and thumbnails, my top Dorico feature requests have been met, and the iPad version has become a fully integrated part of my cloud-based computing workflow.

Project contents now have preview thumbnails. You can initiate Quick Look by pressing the space bar. This will allow you to preview the document more fully without opening the file.

You can read more about Dorico 2.2 in their blog post.

Microtuner by Ableton

Ableton released a Microtuner recently. I have had a lot of fun playing around with it using these Scala files.

Microtuner by Ableton:

Microtuner by Ableton is a MIDI device that lets you import, edit, and generate microtonal scales. Load scale files, create custom scales, and morph between tunings in real time – all with polyphony, MPE, and Lead/Follow modes to sync your scales across instruments.

One of these days, I'd like to make more Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks, and this tool very well might help me get the process done quicker.

Be sure to check out the demo songs in Ableton's blog post. Very cool.

MaskerAid is an app that allows you to quickly and easily add emoji to images with machine learning

Casey Liss, co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, has released a new app called MaskerAid.

Announcing MaskerAid:

In short, MaskerAid allows you to quickly and easily add emoji to images. Plus, thanks to the magic of ✨ machine learning ✨, MaskerAid will automatically place emoji over any faces it detects. There’s several reasons you may want to hide a face:

• The face of a child who is too young to consent to their image being shared
• The faces of the children in your classroom, or your own classmates, who really don’t need to be in your images
• The faces of protestors who are standing up against a grotesque war
• The other faces in a particularly great shot of you, but was taken as part of a group

I can definitely see this coming in handy for sharing photographs of the classroom. You can check out MaskerAid here.

Audio Hijack 4, Shortcuts, Podcasting Automation

Audio Hijack 4 is Here! | Rogue Amoeba Blog:

Today, we’re thrilled to unveil a major upgrade to Audio Hijack, our flagship audio recorder and processor. Audio Hijack 4 brings both powerful new functionality and powerful new interfaces, to make its ability to record any audio on your Mac more accessible than ever. With an absolutely ridiculous 107 new features, enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes, Audio Hijack has never been better.

Read on to learn more or just click to download Audio Hijack 4!

Audio Hijack is an essential tool in my workflow. I use it to do everything from recording my podcast to capturing audio from apps. It's sort of a Swiss Army Knife of audio utilities on the Mac. And today it gets better.

You can read the post from Rogue Amoeba above to get the full scoop. You can read my previous post on Audio Hijack to get a feel for how I use it. I also had Rogue Amoeba's CEO Paul Kafasis on Music Ed Tech Talk to talk about all sorts of creative ways to use their audio apps in the classroom.

My favorite new feature of Audio Hijack 4 is the Shortcuts integration.

I can now automate features of Audio Hijack by adding actions in my Shortcuts. One example of this is my "Podcasting" Shortcut which I trigger before I record my show (or go on Zoom calls).

This Shortcut...

• reminds me to turn off my fan (using the speak text action)
• tracks how long I record in the time tracking app Timery
• sets a reminder to turn back on the fan later in the evening
• opens Craft and Obsidian (where I keep my show outline and show notes, respectively)
• opens Zoom, launches the meeting, mutes my mic, and records the call (as a back up)

Now I can add Audo Hijack as a step. In the action above, I am having it automatically start running my "Input Device" session, which takes the audio input of my Scarlet 6i6 audio interface and records it as an AIFF.

This Shortcut also puts my devices into a Podcasting Focus mode which silences all notifications except the ones from my wife.