Robby explains how he uses Noteflight, Soundtrap, and Flipgrid to create engaging, asynchronous, assignments for students in his performing ensembles.
Show Notes
Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software - Video and Blog Post
Learn more about Noteflight on METT #13 - Exploring Noteflight Learn, with John Mlynczak
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I have been meaning to write about "what I have been doing for online learning" since the fall.
This has proven difficult for many reasons, mostly that there is a lot I have been doing and it is all interconnected.
Generally, my planning and technology use has fallen into two categories.
Tech that supports synchronous classes (via Zoom/Google Meet/etc.)
Tech that supports the asynchronous work (via LMS, cloud-based and student-facing software, etc.)
Fortunately, I was invited to present at two music conferences this year, MMEA and TMEA, and each of my accepted sessions has serendipitously aligned with each of those areas.
This presentation in the video above is an overview of the asynchronous part. In other words, how I am keeping my virtual instruction focused on playing instruments solo, through student-facing tools like Noteflight, Soundtrap, Flipgrid, and a handful of iOS utility apps.
These strategies were developed while I was teaching virtually but they can just as easily be used in a hybrid or in-person teaching model. I would argue that they are just as valuable in either of those environments.
This presentation was first given at TMEA on Saturday, February 14th, 2021.
You can view the notes to this session here.
Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.
Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple's relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.
Making the Grade: What will Apple Silicon mean for Apple's education strategy? - 9to5Mac:
I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.
I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.
I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!
Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn't exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple's vision for an "app-centric" model were the norm instead of the "web-centric" model we have now.
Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.
I am thrilled that Flat for Education is sponsoring Music Ed Tech Talk this month. Their product is a breath of fresh air in a landscape of frustrating education software. More on that in a moment, but first, their own words:
Flat for Education offers music educators and their students the most affordable cloud-based music notation software on the market. Empowering teachers to create playful and engaging music activities, creations, assessments on any device at any time.
The platform integrates with every well-known learning management system available: Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Canvas, Schoology, and MusicFirst to name a few. Everything will be synchronized with your existing setup to avoid any time loss.
Flat for Education offers an advanced system of assignments allowing you to create playful and stunning music activities with your students.
Create a template for all your students to start working from, or simplify the toolbar to have them only working with eighth and quarter notes. The only limit is your imagination.
Save a lot of time by generating worksheets and quizzes in just a few clicks for your students to practice music theory.
Finally, band directors and choirs conductors can have their students directly recording their performance from home for review.
Whether you are teaching remotely or in-person, Flat for Education will support you in creating playful and engaging music activities in no time. Try it free for 90 days on flat.io/edu.
Since my school district moved to online teaching in March, I have had the opportunity to test a greater variety of web-based music teaching software. Much of this I have been able to use practically, with kids using the tools on the other end, and in combination with our district's learning management software.
The user interface of Flat for Education is really simple and clean. It is immediately easy for a teacher or student to find the features they are looking for and every click feels responsive and fast!
I will put this simply: a lot of education technology is buggy, unintuitive, and difficult to decipher. Music technology is no exception. One thing I really appreciate about Flat for Education is the design. It is simple, beautiful, and straightforward.
I am not just referring to the graphical design of Flat for Education. I am referring to the experience of using it. The onboarding could not be more straightforward or direct. Menus in the score editor are simply laid out, buttons respond quickly, note heads drag smoothly, and nothing takes too many clicks to accomplish. I did a lot of testing before writing this post and found that every feature I tried was easy and reliable. Even something niche like batch uploading numerous XML files from Dorico into my Flat for Education library was quick and rock-solid.
Another example of how clean and easy to understand the Flat for Education experience is. Batch uploading numerous files I created in Dorico into my Flat Score Library happened in a flash before my eyes!
As frustrating as education tech often is for the teacher, we know that it is infinitely harder for our students. If you are teaching in person, online, or hybrid, technology can engage and empower students or frustrate them so much they want to give up. But when the technology is as easy as Flat for Education, the software gets out of the way, and the learning content comes to the center.
I think it is important also to highlight that these scores are collaborative and cross-platform. You might be thinking this is obvious considering it runs in a web browser, but I point it out here because so much of the growth in web-first teaching tools is happening at the expense of our students who are depending on mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. Flat is built not only to run on any browser, but any computing platform. Students can easily work on the same documents together if they are running Chrome on a Chromebook, iOS, or whatever platform is available to them. And it’s easy too!
It is so impressive to me that Flat for Education has prioritized the user experience to this level of detail on top of building an excellent score editor and learning environment. Be sure to check out the 90-day free trial if you are looking for a teaching platform built on top of a great score editor, or simply for a tool that empowers your students to interact with musical notation in a freeing way. Again, my thanks to Flat for Education for sponsoring this month of Music Ed Tech Talk.
My school district purchased us some music tech services for use in our online classes this fall. I have been meaning to write at more length about Noteflight Learn and Soundtrap, but I am still getting my heels into the ground with them. Both services take time to learn how they are effective in practice, not to mention there are a lot of quirks with how they integrate with our learning management software, Canvas.
I did want to highlight some upcoming features to Noteflight Learn, specifically regarding their new SoundCheck integration which launched this past summer. My district purchased the SoundCheck integration which means that I can give Noteflight scores as assessments where my band students play the notes into the computer and get a score. Some of these forthcoming features are going to save me a lot of headaches and I am glad to see them coming.
Check out the full list in the blog post below from John Mlynczak. I have quoted some of my favorites.
New Features Coming Soon
We are working on several new features to be made available ASAP. In the coming weeks, here is what you will see:
- The SoundCheck assessment rating will be automatically added to grade book of your own LMS, including Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Powerschool, Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, and more.
- Students just need to complete their assignment and use the same “Turn In” button already available in Noteflight Learn.
- All Content Library scores will include a SoundCheck version that can be used right away. You can always edit a Content Library score and create your own SoundCheck version as well.
And the cherry on top for this iPad-loving, late-night, couch worker:
- iOS functionality. SoundCheck currently does not work in the browser on iOS.
Thanks to my sponsor this month, MusicFirst
David MacDonald returns to the show to talk about the hardware and software in our virtual teaching setups. Then we speculate about touchscreen Macs and consider how Apple's recent App Store policies might impact the future of creative professional software on iOS.
Topics include:
Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
David MacDonald - Twitter | Website | Blog
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Today's episode is sponsored by MusicFirst:
MusicFirst offers music educators and their students easy-to-use, affordable, cloud-based software that enables music learning, creation, assessment, sharing, and exploration on any device, anywhere, at any time.
MusicFirst Classroom is the only learning management system designed specifically for K-12 music education. It combines the flexibility of an LMS with engaging content and powerful software integrations to help manage your students’ progress, make lesson plans, and create assignments.
And for younger students, MusicFirst Junior is the perfect online system for teaching elementary general music. It includes a comprehensive K-5 curriculum, hundreds of lessons & songs, and kid-friendly graphics to making learning and creating music fun!
Whether you’re teaching remotely, in-person, or in a blended learning environment, MusicFirst will work with you to find a solution that fits your program’s unique needs. Try it free for 30 days at musicfirst.com.
David’s teaching setup.
My teaching setup.
…From far away.
I am thrilled that Music Ed Tech Talk is sponsored by MusicFirst this month. What is MusicFirst? In their own words:
MusicFirst offers music educators and their students easy-to-use, affordable, cloud-based software that enables music learning, creation, assessment, sharing, and exploration on any device, anywhere, at any time.
MusicFirst Classroom is the only learning management system designed specifically for K-12 music education. It combines the flexibility of an LMS with engaging content and powerful software integrations to help manage your students’ progress, make lesson plans, and create assignments.
And for younger students, MusicFirst Junior is the perfect online system for teaching elementary general music. It includes a comprehensive K-5 curriculum, hundreds of lessons & songs, and kid-friendly graphics to making learning and creating music fun!
Whether you’re teaching remotely, in-person, or in a blended learning environment, MusicFirst will work with you to find a solution that fits your program’s unique needs. Try it free for 30 days at musicfirst.com.
This past school year, I piloted our district's General Music II class. It marks the first time in our school system where a middle school level music class has built off of a prior year of skill development. Along with this development, our school's Mac lab began to get phased out and replaced with Chromebooks.
I decided to invest in MusicFirst, a holistic, all-in-one, solution for teaching music with computers.
A small grant covered the cost of some low-end MIDI controllers, and my 8th graders were off! MusicFirst, and the integrated third party apps, blew open the doors. Suddenly we could compose notation with the clarity and creativity that Noteflight offers. Soundtrap, one of the digital audio workstations that you can bundle with a MusicFirst subscription, stores its content in the cloud, meaning students were never limited to the instruments or loops that happened to be installed on the Mac they sat down at that day.
To top it off, we were able to apply our piano skill from earlier in the semester to record our original parts into the computers. The fact that this software runs on the web means students can work on projects at home. It's fantastic!
In March, when schools shifted to an online model, MusicFirst suddenly increased in value. I honestly don't know how I would have taught my music class without it. Soundtrap kept students engaged in creating music once every week and collaborating on projects.
MusicFirst's content library is massive. You can download an entire course-worth of units and lesson plans from dozens of pre-built classes.
In my early curiosity, I downloaded MusicFirst's "Middle School Music Technology" class to my account and invited all of my students to it. I was able to easily drag and drop lessons and units from this course into dates on a calendar and have them appear as tasks to students. These lesson plans include clear instructions, engaging media, and assignments that link directly out to whatever software is required to get the task done.
For example, we spent some time learning the blues last spring. There is a unit in the pre-made music tech course that teaches students some blues basics. It starts with a lesson plan that has a pre-made playlist featuring artists like B. B. King. After listening to some recorded examples, it links students to a discussion task, where they can comment about the stylistic features of the music. Next, students move on to a lesson that explains the blues scale and links directly to a Soundtrap project, where the are tasked to record an improvisation using the notes of the blues scale. Saving their work in Soundtrap automatically saves it to the assignment in MusicFirst, where I can review and grade them all in the same place.
The pre-made content is a life saver if are teaching out of your content area and are feeling overwhelmed. Even if you are not, the content will speed things up for you. (Aggregating Spotify playlists, images, and instructions into a meaningfully structured lesson takes time, even if the ideas are already in your head!).
The course content is also fully customizable. In the blues example above, I wanted the improvisation assignment in Soundtrap to have a 12 bar bass line and shuffle beat pre-recorded, so that students felt like they were playing along to something. I was able to accomplish this, and saved a lot of time due to the instructions and embedded media having already been curated.
Give MusicFirst a try. It is such a comprehensive offering, that I am sure it can enhance your teaching! Click herefor more details.
Left: A draft of a Canvas page, written in a text file on my computer. I used the Markdown syntax for headings, lists, and links. Right: What the Canvas page looks like once the text on the left is imported into the course page as HTML.
My district’s LMS of choice is Canvas, which is pretty stressful to work with. From most accounts I hear about other LMS software, Canvas is far from the worst. “You go to war with the LMS you have” I once heard.
Lately, I am writing my Canvas content in Markdown and storing it as text files on my computer.
Why?
Canvas is littered with user-hostile behaviors. Each class is a separate container. All files, pages, and assignments are quarantined, requiring multi-step procedures for sharing between courses. On top of this, the organizing tools are a mess. I am never 100 percent sure where to go. Even when I do, I have to wait for the internet to load each new thing I click on.
Instead of one file repository that all courses pull from, each class has its own separate Files area.
Canvas is equally difficult for students. All of the course pages and content are just sort of floating in space. It’s up to the teacher to link the material together meaningful, but the tools to do so are inelegant and unintuitive. My music program has resorted to a website for communicating most general information since it exposes the hierarchy of its structure to our viewers. In other words, we control where every page lives, and our students can get to any part of our site from the navigation bar at the top of the page.
The WYSIWYG web editors you see within most Canvas pages, assignments, and announcements are equally frustrating. They are clunky, the text field is tiny, the buttons for all the tools are ambiguous, and I lose my data if the page refreshes itself or I lose connection. Additionally, it’s hard to anticipate what my formatting will look like before actually clicking the save button.
Lately, I am writing my Canvas content in Markdown and storing it as text files on my computer. By editing in Markdown, I can create content in third-party apps, work with data offline, control where files are organized, search them from the Spotlight, and quickly export as HTML for input into the Canvas HTML editor when I am ready to publish.
I like native applications because the good ones feel designed to look like the computing platform. For example, the forScore app on iOS uses similar navigation buttons and fonts to Apple’s own Mail, Keynote, Pages, and Notes. This way, I don’t feel like I am learning new software.
Native apps that deal with documents store files on my hard drive. I can easily organize them into my own folder system, work on them without an internet connection, open the same file in different applications, and search them from the Spotlight. Document-based apps update your file as you edit your data. Websites often lose your data when they run into issues.
I don’t write anything longer than a sentence or two into the text field of a website. Instead, I draft them inDrafts and move my work to iAWriter for longer projects. Both of these apps can preview Markdown.
Markdown is a shorthand syntax for HTML. It empowers me to draft web content without actually writing code. Skim this Markdown syntax guide to see what I mean. You can learn the basics in five minutes.
Drafts and iA Writer have one-button shortcuts to convert Markdown to formatted text or HTML. Here is an example of Markdown, and what it would look like once converted to rich text or HTML.
# Blog Post Title
Here are *three things* I want to do today.
1. Work out
2. Sit in the hot tub
3. Grill some chicken
Let me tell you more about them.
## Work out
Today I will work out on my bike. My wife once said, and I quote:
> The earlier in the day you aim to do it, the more likely it is to happen.
## Sit in the hot tub
This will be relaxing. Maybe I will listen to a podcast there. Here are some recent favorites...
- Sound Expertise
- Sticky Notes
- Upgrade
My favorite podcast player is [Overcast](https://overcast.fm).Once an app like Drafts or iA Writer converts the Markdown to rich text, it would look like this:
A good Markdown app like iA Writer will convert the syntax to rich text for you and copy it so that you can paste it into an application like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or your website.
I could have just as easily exported the resulting rich text to a Word document or Google Doc and all of the formatting would have been properly executed.
iAWriter can also export my Markdown as HTML like this:
<h1>Blog Post Title</h1>
<p>Here are <em>three things</em> I want to do today.</p>
<ol>
<li>Work out</li>
<li>Sit in the hot tub</li>
<li>Grill some chicken</li>
</ol>
<p>Let me tell you more about them.</p>
<h2>Work out</h2>
<p>Today I will workout on my bike. My wife once said, and I quote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The earlier in the day you aim to do it, the more likely it is to happen.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sit in the hot tub</h2>
<p>This will be relaxing. Maybe I will listen to a podcast there. Here are some recent favorites...</p>
<ul>
<li>Sound Expertise</li>
<li>Sticky Notes</li>
<li>Upgrade</li>
</ul>
<p>My favorite podcast player is <a href="https://overcast.fm">Overcast</a>.</p>Because Markdown can be converted to HTML automatically, I have found it less stressful to actually write my Canvas pages, announcements, and messages to parents in Markdown and then pasting the resulting HTML into the HTML editor of Canvas. I store my Markdown files in a folder of text files, with subfolders for each course. I have favorited these folders so that they are always accessible in the iA Writer sidebar. These folders are easily accessible. Because I am writing in plaintext, the result feels much more like writing in a simple note app than it does a word processor.
iA Writer links to folders of text files on your hard drive. But it looks like a simple note app.
Here is an example of a Canvas announcement intended to be shared with one of my band classes early this fall. It contains an embedded Google Form families sign as an agreement to our policies. Markdown and HTML can be written in the same document and iA Writer treats it all as HTML when you export it.
I got the HTML embed straight from the Share menu of the Google Form setup. I didn't need to know any code to make this message!
On the left: a Markdown document that contains HTML code for a Google Form embed. On the right: pasting that as HTML into the HTML editor in Canvas.
How the resulting announcement appears to students.
EDIT: When I wrote this post, I fogtot to add one benefit to having all of these files on your computer… even though Canvas messages don’t support formatting like headings and bold, I draft those in iAWriter too. It is SO much easier to find and re-use old emails I have sent to parents when they are searchable from my computer. Have you ever tried to search your Canvas ‘Sent’ folder? It’s terrible! Local computer copies for the win!
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Meredith Allen, Sales Enablement Manager at Soundtrap, joins the show to talk about using Soundtrap in the music classroom to create music and podcasts, getting acquired by Spotify, and wearing hard pants.
Prompts for Making Beats (Link to the Soundtrap Packet I mention in the episode)
VLC Media Player (and file converter)
App of the Week: Robby - Permute Meredith - Innovators Compass
Album of the Week: Robby - Dreams Come True | Love Goes On Meredith - Rocketman Soundtrack
Where to Find Us: Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book Meredith - Twitter | Website
Find Robby elsewhere on the web