Category: Link Post

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!

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.

CleanShot 2022-04-13 at 11.49.33.png

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.

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.

Band Score Order in Dorico 4.0.10 — Ehler

Band directors rejoice! The latest Dorico 4 update improves score ordering for band instruments. Click and read band director Ehler’s blog post below to learn more about this feature.

Band Score Order in Dorico 4.0.10:

It’s a little tricky to find the band score order toggle; you do so by right-clicking the sorting icon at the bottom of the left-pane, which will give you options between different score orders (leaving room for more to come).

If you set that right from the start, then as you add instruments, they’ll appear in the correct order. If you unwittingly were working in orchestral score order first and need to then adjust, simply switch it over to band score order and then left click the same icon again to have it impose that score order on your players.

Ehler provided feedback to Steinberg about this feature and for this I say thanks!

Dorico 2 Released for iPad

Speaking of Dorico, Dorico 2 for iPad is now out on the App Store. It’s free and comes with many improvements, my favorite being Apple Pencil support in Read view.

When I wrote about Dorico 1.0 for iPad, I expressed my enthusiasm for it sharing similar code with the then-upcoming desktop version of Dorico 4. Basing the iPad version on the desktop code has indeed expedited feature releases. I am hopeful for the development speed that both the mobile and desktop versions of Dorico will receive in the future.

While I don’t use the read view in Dorico for iPad a ton, I am excited to see the addition of annotation support with Apple Pencil. Even though it doesn’t do note input, this development shows that the Dorico team is iterating fast and responding to user feedback.

Check out the Dorico release below.

Dorico for iPad 2.0 now available from the App Store:

We are pleased to announce that a new version of the top-rated music notation app for iPad, Dorico for iPad, is now available for free download from the App Store. If you already have Dorico for iPad installed, go to the Updates tab in the App Store app on your iPad to grab the update.

This new version brings many of the new features added to Dorico 4 for macOS and Windows to iPadOS and adds support for freehand annotations in Read view using the Apple Pencil for those users who choose to take advantage of the optional in-app purchase subscription. Read on for more details.

Kanban Boards in Todoist

I am preparing two presentations for the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference next month, and one of the sessions is on collaboration and communication apps for music teams.

As I prepare this session, I came across this blog post draft from a while back that I think could be helpful for those looking for a graphical way to think about their various teaching responsibilities…

You can now “visualize your workflow with Board view in Todoist” by testing the beta version on both iOS and the web. Read more here.

I am pretty committed to OmniFocus for personal project management. But I have always liked Todoist. Todoist is the service I recommend to most people for tasks. It is simple to use and has a free tier. And if you pay for the subscription, it is full of features almost all the features you could ask for from a to-do app. Its native apps are not as well-designed as Things or as powerful as OmniFocus, but they are good enough.

If you are the kind of visual thinker who prefers a board-style for project management, Todoist will now allow you to depict your projects and tasks in a drag-and-drop, card-style interface.

NPR Playlist – 50 Best Albums of 2021, Ranked

For a while, I had a holiday tradition of taking “best albums of the year” posts on the web, and making Apple Music playlists out of them.

NPR has started doing this, which saves me some time, but I sort of miss the ritual.

Anyway, here are links to their streaming playlists. I always learn about some good new music listening through this list every year.

Some of my favorites I have already heard are, in no particular order…

  • An Evening with Silk Sonic, Silk Sonic
  • Mood Valiant, Hiatus Kaiyote
  • Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra

NPR Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2021, Ranked : NPR

If the year presently coming to a close was a dance, it’d be a hesitant shuffle, tentative steps toward — or heyyyy, maybe away from? — an uncertain future. So maybe that’s why, when we sat down together to discuss which albums we loved the most over the course of 2021, NPR Music’s staff and contributors found ourselves drawn to albums by artists making breakthroughs, moving forward with clarity, without balking at the obstacles falling in their way. Our list of the year’s 50 best is topped by an album that was unmatched in concept, songwriting or performance, but it had so much good company. Everywhere on this list you’ll find the thrill of artistic revelation, musicians finding themselves, willing something new into reality. There’s plenty of fun, but little escapism. Many of these albums are stacked with great songs, but these aren’t snacks. Even when slight they are composed, with a sense of purpose. This is nourishment. Look around. You’ll find something fortifying to build you up for the road ahead. (As a bonus, you can find our list of the 100 Best Songs of 2021 here.)

_Stream NPR Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2021:Spotify / Apple Music / Tidal / Amazon Music / YouTube Music