Sponsor: Light the Music

Thanks to my sponsor this month, Light the Music:

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.

Blink Session Music: Because Virtual Music Lessons are More Than a Video Chat (Sponsor)

Your virtual music lessons are more than a video chat. You interact over sheet music, tabs, audio, YouTube, videos. Sound quality is more important than a chat with grandma. Using advanced settings must be easy. Then, what about homework, scheduling, getting paid? Everything is important but at times requires using multiples online tools that can get time-consuming and complicated both for you and your student.

Blink Session Music is the most advanced and easy-to-use software for online music lessons. Upgraded sound? Absolutely, but Blink goes way beyond to upgrade your entire online lesson experience and business operations.

Are you stuck using Zoom or Skype? Then you're stuck with screen share. With Blink Session Music, load sheet music, tabs (with midi), audio or videos you upload, YouTube, all without screen share. Even assign all your music resources as homework.

Using a DAW or virtual mixer to stream your guitar or keyboard? No need with Blink. Stream up to three audio sources, at up to 300kbps mono or stereo. Plus toggle noise suppression off.

Blink Session Music's features go way beyond the lesson. Schedule, self-schedule, reminders, invoices, take payments, notes, files, homework, learning management, reports, and online lessons, all in the same platform.

Sign up now for Blink's free plan or take the plunge to a paid plan with more time and features.

DMV Percussion Academy - Find your rhythm at the best percussion workshop around!

Thanks to my sponsor this week, DMV Percussion Academy, a summer percussion workshop in Maryland.

The workshop is for students grade 6 through 12. Students experience clinics, masterclasses, personal coaching, and college/career advice by the region’s top performers and educators. Students will also present a percussion ensemble concert at the end of the year.

The clinician list is full of local and national all-stars! Be sure to check it out and follow the program on social media @DMVPercussion

“Find your rhythm at the best percussion workshop around! We hit different!”

Flat for Education (Sponsor)

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.

MusicFirst (Sponsor)

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.