Light the Music empowers educators to ignite student creativity and collaboration. Using a digital audio workstation, students learn about the fundamentals of music while creating their own music that is authentic, relevant, and meaningful to them.
Light the Music provides a curriculum aligned with the creating strand of the National Core Arts Standards. As students are introduced to the technology tools, they create an artist’s profile to guide their work throughout the curriculum. Students then learn about the elements that make up a piece of music; rhythm, chords, bass, and melody. They learn concepts by recreating and remixing, then use that knowledge to create something new. In each lesson, students share their work with classmates to give and receive feedback that is kind, specific, honest, and helpful.
The Light the Music curriculum comprises 8 units and 26 lessons, containing tutorial videos, templates, resources, and slides to make teaching easy. In each lesson, students learn, practice, and apply new skills. The curriculum offers a scaffolded structure for teachers to sequence lessons, yet contains enough flexibility for students to get support or dive deeper when desired. Students will work towards creating their own piece of music and a video to go along with it. At the conclusion of the 8 units, students share their work in a final showcase.
Light the Music is ideal for students in sixth through twelfth grade general **music, music technology, music appreciation, or any other music courses where student creativity is a goal. Additional stand-alone lesson plans for teachers looking for a one-time project are also available. If you’d like to learn more, check out www.lightthemusic.com.
Though not a blog post, My Favorite Technology continues to be one of the most popular pages of robbyburns.com. It contains a list of my most depended on hardware, software, and services.
*The following post first appeared on the NAfME Blog on April 19th, 2021.
Over the past year of remote and hybrid instruction, teachers have reimagined the tools, assignments, and methods that best engage their students. The need to engage my band students from a distance has challenged me to depend on cloud-based tools that still foster the development of their performance skills. The features of these cloud tools allow me to engage students in new ways by introducing interactive projects, collaboration with peers, and automated grading.
The ideas below will be featured in my presentation at the NAfME Eastern Division Conference this weekend. Register here to join me and the many exceptional presenters who will be sharing their ideas.
What is Cloud Software
Cloud software is a buzzword in the technology industry that is used to describe apps that run in a web browser. Examples of cloud-based music software include BandLab, Soundtrap, Noteflight, MusicFirst, and Flat for Education, to name a few. Because these offerings are web-based, they can run on nearly any computer with a web browser, as long as you have an internet connection. For this reason, they are more widely accessible to all students and can be integrated into an LMS (learning management software) like Canvas, Blackboard, and Google Classroom.
Here are some practical ideas for assignments in a performing ensemble using cloud software.
Noteflight
Noteflight is a music notation tool that runs on the web. In recent years, Noteflight has expanded to offer Noteflight Learn, which allows teachers to take Noteflight content and assign it to students in their class, much like an LMS. In the past year, Noteflight has added a feature called SoundCheck which can take these assigned Noteflight scores, and assess student performance for note/rhythm/pitch accuracy.
Students can play these scores, practice to them at any speed, and loop tricky sections. When they are done recording themselves, Noteflight provides an accuracy score and a line beneath the notes which indicates pitch and note inaccuracies by the counter and color of the line.
You can make any Noteflight score into a Soundcheck-enabled assignment. If the score is linked to an assignment in your LMS, the student score will automatically go into your grade book. Because computers are not perfect, I prefer to go back and listen to my students who don't receive good scores on assignments, to make sure I agree with the automatic grade.
Generally, is better at assessing note accuracy than pitch, so I tend to use SoundCheck as a first step to ensuring students are prepared for their music. Finer qualities in the music like tone and articulation are best left to video assessments with more comprehensive rubrics.
Getting Existing Music Into Soundcheck
If you have music that outside of Noteflight that you want to turn into an assessment, some apps can help. I use an app called Sheet Music Scanner on my iPad to take pictures of paper sheet music and turn them into XML files. XML is a file format that can pass notation projects from one notation editor to another. Once the XML version is saved to my device, I can import it into Noteflight and then assign it to my students.
Notation editors like Sibelius and Dorico can export to XML. If you have already created a score in a professional editor, it is easy to turn into an assignment.
Flipgrid
If your LMS does not have a video recording feature built-in, you might want to check out Flipgrid. My LMS has a video feature, and I still use Flipgrid because it makes video recording whimsical and fun. The Flipgrid interface puts an active circle around your face when you have submitted a recent video (like an Instagram story). Students can add filters, emoji, text, and other effects to their final videos. Students can watch each other's videos, and leave video responses. It is like a mini social network for your class, with lots of control over the privacy settings.
Flipgrid also integrates into LMS software, so you can use it as an alternative to the basic video recorder if you wish.
Soundtrap
Soundtrap is a web-based DAW (digital audio workstation). I have heard it described as "if Google Docs and GarageBand had a baby." This is because it looks and functions like GarageBand, but runs on the web. Like Google's apps, it is also collaborative. This means that you can have two or more students editing the same project at the same time while discussing their progress in a chat.
Soundtrap is great for producing beats, songwriting, and all of the things you would expect to do with access to limitless software instruments, samples, and pre-made loops. But what I use it for in the band room is to teach chamber music.
If I have a flute trio, for example, I can provide the music to my students and then invite them all to a Soundtrap project. Each student can create their audio track and record their part to the metronome. They can all be doing this simultaneously. Once they click save, they can play it back and hear what they sound like alongside one another in a somewhat real-time experience.
A fun alternative to this is to give a small ensemble piece to a single student and have them overdub themselves playing each part. This can help them to better understand how the varying parts fit together and complement one another. In cases like this, I have reached out to the local high school and asked for student volunteers to play all of the parts to a metronome. I then take all of the high schooler's recordings and add them as tracks in a Soundtrap template so that my students can toggle each part on and off for reference while they are recording.
You can see an example of this around the 20-minute mark in the video below.
Conclusion
These cloud-based assignments empower all students to participate in engaged music-making, alone and in groups. Nailing down the accuracy with a metronome will do wonders for their sense of timing and internal pulse. With recording assignments in Noteflight and Soundtrap, my students will do numerous takes until they get it just right! I cannot speak highly enough of these tools, and I certainly plan to use the assignment ideas above even when we return to a fully in-person learning environment.
If a video of this process is more your speed, you can watch how some of it works below. I also have a podcast version of this post available here.
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.
I am taking part in a Panel Discussion called "Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic" this Wednesday, August 5th. It is taking place on the Music Teachers Facebook Group at 8 pm through Zoom.
I will specifically be contributing ideas about practical instruction for performing ensembles. I am planning to discuss everything from large group rehearsal to break-out chamber ensembles, to music scanning apps, and software for assessing student performance.
Some great minds are involved. Here is a description of the panel from the Facebook Event:
Join us for a free online panel discussion with several of your Music Teacher Administrators and Moderators and special guests as we discuss the tools, techniques, and resources to move your music ensembles and music classrooms totally online or to a blended learning hybrid. Panelists include Jim Frankel, CEO of Music First; Katie Wardrobe, Director, Midnight Music Technology Training; Ron Kearns, retired HS band teacher; Tom West Blended Learning Instrumental Music teacher; Robby Burns, MS band teacher; Richard McCready, HS guitar teacher & music ministry; Tiffany Walker, MS band teacher; Krystal Williams, HS band teacher.
If you are interested, you can join the group here. Note: You will not be admitted into the group if you do not answer the questions.
Five years ago, StaffPad came to Windows Surface tablets. StaffPad is a professional music notation application that turns handwritten notes into beautiful music notation. It is built around the stylus being the primary input, and because the iPad did not have stylus support at launch, StaffPad remained Windows only.
Multiple years into Apple supporting its own official stylus, the Apple Pencil, StaffPad is finally here on iPad!
StaffPad’s intro video sells itself, so I am not going to write much about the app here. Instead, I point you to…
Since the features of StaffPad are covered in the links above, I want to comment on two interesting aspects of this release.
First, the price. At $89.99, this is no impulse purchase. I find it refreshing to see a professionally priced app like this on the App Store. For years, the App Store has seen a race to the bottom type approach for grabbing sales. Users are so used to <5 dollar apps that the idea of paying for software has diminished from reality.
Increasingly, developers are finding that subscription based pricing is the only way to maintain software and put food on the table. There was a big discussion about this in the Apple community last week when beloved calendar application Fantastical released their version 3 and went to subscription pricing. As is customary when an app goes to subscription pricing, users of the application and bystanders alike were enraged at the idea of a calendar costing four dollars a month.
I couldn’t resist sneaking my love of Fantastical into this post. The interface is beautiful.
And the natural language input is one of many essential features that helps me get my work done more efficiently.
As a user of Fantastical, I was happy to keep supporting development. It is one of my most used applications on a daily basis and its features are essential to me having a full time teaching job, while also scheduling gigs, 25 private students, speaking engagements, and all of my other personal events.
Fantastical is what I would call a prosumer application. It offers more power to someone looking for an advanced and well designed calendar, and it has a wide appeal (everyone needs a calendar!). Four dollars a month is steep, but manageable. Now that the price is reoccurring, I do think it will appeal to a smaller audience, as each user will have to reevaluate on a monthly or yearly basis whether or not this application is continuing to be worth the cost.
StaffPad is very different. It is a professional creation tool. Much like Photoshop is essential to designers and photographers, score editors are essential to the lives of most musicians, composers, and music educators. By charging 89 dollars, StaffPad follows a long history of apps in its field, which are often priced between 200 and 600 dollars.
I have to wonder… if the iPad had more software like this, and from an earlier point in time, would users have adjusted their expectations and would more expensive professional apps be more viable? And if so, would the viability of such professional apps lead to more (and better) professional apps on iOS?
And furthermore, would Apple adjust to these trends? Apple still offers no free trial for apps (something that will definitely deter a lot of my music teaching colleagues away from giving StaffPad a chance). Not to mention that professional creative software has a tradition of volume licensing and educator discounts. Educators who would normally be able to afford a program like this for themselves or their class are going to be stuck if they are looking for the same options with StaffPad.
App developers get around to this in number of ways, an example of which is to offer a free app where you have to buy it as an in-app purchase after a week. Of course there is also the subscription model. I am glad StaffPad went with a more traditional model than a subscription because it fits within the tradition of how its class of software is priced. And my hope is that this just might convince more developers to bring their own apps to iPadOS.
Which brings me to my second point…
StaffPad doesn’t, and probably wont, have a macOS app. It is built entirely around stylus input. This is why it could only exist on Windows Surface tablets at first. I am thrilled it is on iPad, but this presents an interesting question for users of Apple products.
A Windows Surface user notices no distinction between whether or not StaffPad operates on a touch-based OS or a traditional point-and-click OS, because they are one and the same. Even as macOS and iPadOS move closer and closer together, this distinction has lead them to be products with very different potentials.
On the other end, all the other players in the score-editor field (Sibelius, Finale, Dorico) remain “desktop” applications that run on traditional point-and-click operating systems. With the power of the current iPad Pro, there is no reason these applications couldn’t exist on iOS, other than that developing for iOS is very different. None of these developers have shown any signs of bringing their programs to iPadOS any time soon, and I would suspect StaffPad has no plans for a Mac version.
I admire how Apple has held their ground about the iPad being the iPad and the Mac being the Mac. It has made both platforms stronger. But as the iPad becomes a more viable machine for getting work done, Apple has got to get a plan for how to solve this essential “input” question.
I am thrilled to be presenting at TMEA again this year. Both of my sessions, “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and “Working with Digital Scores” will be taking place on February 17th, at 8 am and 11 am, respectively.
STOCKHOLM — Music streaming company Spotify has bought online music and audio recording studio Soundtrap, it said on Friday, declining to give financial details of the deal.
Stockholm-based Soundtrap allows its subscribers to have an online music studio and create music together with other people in real time, its website says.
”Soundtrap's rapidly growing business is highly aligned with Spotify's vision of democratising the music ecosystem," Spotify said in a statement.
This is a really interesting deal for music technology education. Spotify is a major player in the music streaming space and is well known to the major public. I can definitely see how Soundtrap fits into Spotify’s vision. But it will be interesting to see what they actually do with it, and if it has any influence over Soundtrap’s usefulness in the music classroom.
Amy Burns does some great writing for mustech.net. She is writing to the elementary general music classroom in the blog post linked below, but I think her tips and strategies will resonate with music teachers of every variety. Be sure to check out her blog and subscribe!
This question is excellent and is asked often. When I was performing research for a keynote address I gave recently titled, “How Technology is Transforming the Way We Teach Elementary General Music Classes”, I directly addressed this question. When reading numerous Facebook music education boards, there is a divide on this topic. Music educators will comment on how technology can enhance certain activities like composition and music making for those who have limited abilities. Others will state that their music classroom is a “screen free” zone because students need a break from screens. While others are expected to utilize technology to address 21st century skills or their schools have become 1:1 (one device per student).
