Are you headed to the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference this week?
I hope to see you at one of my two sessions this Friday.
☎️ 2/4, 12:30 pm – Communication and Collaboration Apps for Music Teams
🎷. 2/4, 5:15 pm – Teaching Intonation with Tonal Energy
Both in room 21. Stay tuned to this blog for session notes and two podcast episodes which will compliment these topics.
I am delighted to join the iPad Pros Podcast again, this time to talk about how I use the iPad to teach middle school band and run my private teaching studio.
Listen below or in your favorite podcast app.
You can also check out my most recent guest apperance below, to talk about notation apps on iPad.
David MacDonald joins Robby to share their favorite books, hardware, apps, services, and musical gift ideas.
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Music of the Week
Robby – Sarah Jarosz
David – Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Tech Tip of the Week
Robby – Focus Modes
David – CopyChar.cc
Where to Find Us:
David – Twitter | Website | Blog
Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!
Lately, I’ve been going live at least once a month to cover some kind of way that I use technology to be more efficient in the classroom. I’m doing this mostly for fun, but also to provide Patreon subscribers with more content (the videos remain permanently available to supporters).
I’m going live tomorrow, September 4, around 11 am EST to talk about how I make and work with seating charts digitally. It should be fun! Join me on Twitch, YouTube, or Twitter to tune in. You can follow me using the social icons at the bottom of this site.
The Dorico team has been hard at work since their release of Dorico for iPad.
In case you missed it, Dorico for iPad 1.1 is out. It removes the 12 player limit for subscribers. That, plus many smaller tweaks and bug fixes.
Want to learn more about Dorico for iPad? I’ve got a post, video, and interview with Daniel Spreadbury, their Product Marketing Manager, here.
I’m trying to read more these days.
It might be extra of me, but I am finding more motivation to read by buying duplicate copies of books on Kindle and Audible. The read position syncs between the two. It’s easy to swap between reading and listening depending on whatever is most convenient at the moment.
The Kindle app will even play the Audible recording and highlight each word as it goes by. Though the audio quality is smoother in the Audible app. Audible books are discounted when you already own the Kindle version.
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">Play controls at the bottom of the Kindle App will play audio from the audio purchase of the same book in Audible. </p></div>
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">The play screen in the Kindle app. </p></div>
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">My place in the book is in sync with the Audible app. </p></div>
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My Scale Play-Along Tracks are on sale for $5 from now until November 30. Use code THANKFUL at checkout.
The code is for 10 dollars off so it will also get you a discount on the stems for the play-alongs if you would rather go that route.
The tracks feature three speeds of a chromatically descending Remington pattern, and the following scale patterns in all 12 major keys: whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, scale in thirds, mini scale ending in arpeggio.
Each pattern has a beat underneath and drones in just intonation. You can read more about them here.
Past Music Ed Tech Talk guest, Theresa Hoover, has a new book out with Kathryn Finch.
All too often the music classroom stifles students with one-size-fits-all curricula and repertoire. In Pass the Baton, authors Kathryn Finch and Theresa Hoover turn that paradigm on its head, offering a vision of music education that empowers students as critical thinkers who exercise voice and choice to question, discover, connect, and play like never before—in and out of the classroom.
Pass the Baton offers readers a comprehensive guide to crafting engaging music lessons that transform students from passive consumers to vibrant creatives. Whether you’re looking to rethink general music or overhaul your ensemble groups, Pass the Baton is chock-full of generative, actionable, and impactful tools. Finch and Hoover have drawn on deep research and years of experience in the music room to provide a guide for all music educators to create a learner-centered environment and give students the opportunity to truly own the creative process.
Giving students leadership in the classroom is the one sure way to make sure they understand and engage with your instruction. Though this book has been in development for a long time, I think it’s worth noting also that these strategies have huge relevance in an online or hybrid learning environment, just as they do in person. Click the link above to check the book out on Amazon and purchase it.
You can listen to Theresa discuss the book with me on the podcast episode she was on here. That episode was great fun to record and we covered a ton of topics including student engagement, tech tools, productivity tips, and virtual teaching strategies.
Apple had an iPhone event today. Here are some quick thoughts…
At some point, I will have to reconcile my HomePod excitement with the fact that we still have a bunch of Sonos speakers in the house. I prefer the Sonos system for a number of reasons and would think of any possible HomePod mini purchases as "Siri" purchases more than I would smart home speaker purchases. I hope to write more about smart home audio soon.
You can watch the Apple Event here.
Attendance for Google Meet (download here) is an exceptional extension for Google Chrome that automatically takes attendance for you and saves it to a Google Sheet document in your Google Drive.
There are other extensions like this but most of them are poorly designed, buggy, and unreliable.
Attendance for Google Meet has an elegant and straightforward design and user experience, down to the icon even matching Google’s ‘Material Design’ language. I am especially proud of this extension because it is made by a student at Centennial High School, which is one of the schools that my band program sends students to when they graduate.
Watch the video below to get an idea of what the features look like in action.
The process is simple. Once installed, you are prompted to create a class list the next time you start a Google Meet. Creating a list is as simple as entering the students names and pressing enter after each one. Once a class is created, you can select it from the same menu every time you launch a Meet.
The app logs when kids enter, when they leave, and the total number of minutes they spent in class, so you can catch it if they dip in for the first minute and then leave immediately. Even the Google Sheet is designed to be easy to read.
There are some bugs, notably that the chat window closes frequently during the session. I also have to manually export the list before closing the Meet because the option you check in settings to make this happen automatically keeps turning itself off.
I strongly recommend this extension if you are teaching with Google Meet this year. Congratulations to this awesome student developer on making such a useful tool for teachers!
Music Ed Tech Talk 
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