Big day for Scanner Pro 🚀 We introduce Smart Categories — a new feature that automatically sorts & organizes your documents by categories like Invoices, Receipts, Forms, etc. Download Scanner Pro: 👉https://t.co/hpoEXre5R5 Read the full story: 👉https://t.co/6PYaZ5sJTI
Earlier this fall, my favorite scanning app, Scanner Pro, came out with an update that can automatically categorize documents based on features it can identify across your various files.
One of the things that repels people from going paperless is that it often takes a lot of repetitive steps to manage files. Renaming, organizing in folders, tagging, etc...
Over the years, Scanner Pro has been aggressive about adding features to smartly take on some of this work through automation.
Scanner Pro can now automatically recognize your scans as sheet music, and label them as such.
One of my other favorite features is the ability to designate a specific folder inside of Google Drive or Dropbox to save scans into in one tap. This makes saving scans to a specific folder of sheet music in my Google Drive as easy as can be.
*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.
Are you coming to my TMEA session, Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software today? It starts at 3 pm! Here are the session notes which include links to all of the software mentioned in the presentation.
Last week Chris Russell reviewed a new score scanning app, ScanScore. I kind of like that he turned this review into a comparison of the different options available, with example photos. Here is a link to the post with a quote:
So, how did it work? Again, I’m not in the scanning mode right now, so I’m creating an artificial comparison (something that really isn’t crucial to me on a need-to-get-it-done-as-quickly-as-possible basis). I decided to take a a version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata from IMSLP, and to see how the programs did with it.
While one example is not enough to effectively compare this kind of software, it's still interesting to see where they stack up in the example he provided. I personally find that these scanner apps require more touch up than is worth the effort. In many cases it is still easier to manually recreate the score in a notation app.
Of the apps Chris mentions in the post, Sheet Music Scanner is my favorite, even though it doesn't do triplets yet.
As years pass, I solidify my mainstay productivity apps. I might try 100 todo or scanner apps, but many of the ones I depend on have been on my home screen for years. For a very long time, Readdle’s Scanner Pro was my scanner app of choice for getting documents and sheet music from the real world into my digital database. Scanbot has recently come to challenge it.
Rather than explain all of the features, I have simply embedded a quick screencast below that shows it off. Both Scanner Pro and Scanbot allow the user to very quickly get paper into their phone, make the text searchable, neaten up the edges, and prepare the document for sharing. Both apps make it easy to customize ways to send finished documents to specific locations in your file system. Scanner Pro does this through custom workflows and Scanbot does it by remembering my most commonly saved locations in my iCloud and Google Drive (you can see this on the last screen of the screencast). But Scanbot has a few nice touches that ultimately push me over the edge, especially considering how tedious scanning documents with a phone can be...
Getting the final scan into a particular location is smoother for me in Scanbot because it always has my most recently saved locations one tap away. I also really like the way that when selecting the edges of the paper, Scanbot has handles that drag an entire edge, whereas Scanner Pro only has handles in the four corners. Notice in the video how Scanbot even detects the edge when I get close and automatically snaps to the edge of the page. Note that both of these apps have an automatic mode that detects the edges for you and bypasses this step. I just wanted to demo the neat snapping feature in the video.
Both apps also create a folder in iCloud Drive that will automatically save all snapped documents so that you can instantly run over to another device like your Mac and get to your new files.
Scanner Pro does have a few unique features. First, its custom workflows are very powerful and can do multiple things with your finished PDF (for example: save a document to Evernote with specific tags, add it to a specific folder in Dropbox, and email it to a coworker all in one tap). Second, it can scan your camera roll for things that look like documents (maybe a business card or a page you shot on your camera in a hurry) and transform them into PDFs on the spot. Third, it integrates with Readdle's other great productivity apps, like PDF Expert.
Check out these awesome scanning apps and level up your digital organization!
Tomorrow I will be presenting at the Maryland Music Educators Association's Fall Conference. The session I am presenting is all about Working with Digital Scores. I will be covering file management, scanning, and score reading software such as forScore. I am also going to be digging in to some of the new iPad productivity features that shipped with iOS 11 last month. If you are going to be at the conference, come say hi!
