🎙 #11 – New Announcements from Apple, with Craig McClellan

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

A swift return to the show from Craig McClellan to talk about all of the things Apple announced at their developer conference this past week and how we see it influencing our work.

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Toggl / Timery
Craig – Meeter for Zoom, Teams & Co

Album of the Week:
Robby – Not Our First Goat Rodeo | The Goat Rodeo Sessions
Craig – Central Park on Apple TV+

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Craig – Twitter

🎬 Vivo! – The Ellicott Mills Middle School Wind Ensemble (Virtual Band Video)

Here is the first of a few “virtual band” videos I have been editing over the past few weeks. I am proud of my students for their hard work in unfamiliar conditions. I enjoyed making this a lot, but for different reasons than I enjoy teaching band.

I really refined my audio and video editing workflow for this. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a video post on how I made this using Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and handful of other indie Mac apps.

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🎙 #10 – Designing Curriculum and Assessing Students with FileMaker, with Ben Denne

Robby’s Ellicott Mills Middle School colleague, Ben Denne, joins the show to talk about designing a sequential instrumental music curriculum, and how they track student progress in the FileMaker app. Other topics include:

Workflows for producing virtual band/orchestra videos
The importance of developing audiation in student musicians
The strengths of binary performance rubrics
Art vs. Craft
Understanding relational databases
Data-driven music teaching (the good kind)
Lots more music teaching philosophy

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Discord
Ben – IDAGIO

Album of the Week:
Robby – Sarah Jarosz | World on the Ground
Ben – Marc Ribot | Y Los Cubanos Postizos

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog
Ben – EMMS Music | HoCoYo

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Screenshots of Our FileMaker Database:

Our table of assignment records (Right) and the Layout we use to enter performance records (Left)

Example of the music packets that FileMaker generates for our students:

🔗 Institute for Composer Diversity: State Repertoire Lists (Wind Band)

The Institute for Composer Diversity is curating special lists from their database, and their first one features wind band music! I am especially excited that this list includes works for beginners, an area that I find it typically challenging to program for. There is a lot of beginning music on this list to pick from.

State Lists — Institute for Composer Diversity:

Required state repertoire lists exist differently in every state in the U.S. and ICD, along with our partners in On The List and many others, wants to help to make sure those solo, chamber, and large ensemble lists appropriately provide students with music from many diverse voices. We’re starting with wind band works, but will grow this project to include choir, orchestra, jazz ensembles, and chamber works!

The lists below comprise a growing list of works for wind band composed or arranged by either a woman composer or a composer/arranger from an underrepresented heritage which have been selected by one or more U.S. state for repertoire lists. K-12 schools are required to perform works from these lists at district-and state-wide band festivals and competitions. Most of these works are in our Works Diversity Database (and those that aren’t will soon be)!

🔗 Gizmodo: 6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own MoVies

While Final Cut Pro still gets my vote, this list will probably be useful to my music teaching friends looking to make virtual ensemble videos.

6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own Movies

Video editing is easier than it’s ever been, with the barrier to entry becoming less pricey every year. As long as you have some decent footage to work with, you can turn it into something presentable—and dare we say professional—using programs that won’t cost you anything. Here are six of the best free video editors to help you unleash your inner Oscar-winning director.

https://kit.fontawesome.com/9a5419fedc.js

Never Miss a Task, with Project Templates (OmniFocus Mini-Series)

This is the second part in my series on using OmniFocus to stay on top of my teaching responsibilities. My last post, Staying On Top Of Teaching Responsibilities With Omnifocus Perspectives, details how I use custom Perspectives to ensure that I only see the tasks that are relevant to me in particular working contexts. Today, I am going to write about how I use TaskPaper templates to make sure I don’t forget steps of commonly repeated projects.

Why Project Templates?

As a band director, I have tons of repeating projects. There are numerous concerts a year, field trips, musical repertoire to stuff in folders, and substitutes to prepare lessons for. Usually, the tasks in these projects are the same, and have similar due dates relative to the date of the concert, substitute, or trip.

What is TaskPaper?

OmniFocus allows users to write templates for these projects in plain text using a special syntax called TaskPaper. The TaskPaper syntax is what is used by the application by the same name. It allows users to create and maintain complex projects with checkable tasks, each of which containing tags and due dates. There are no buttons or menus, everything is typed without lifting your hands off the keyboard.

A simple project in TaskPaper would use a colon after the title to bolden it and turn it into a project. Tasks are indicated by dashes, followed by spaces. And tags are indicated by an @ symbol. Therefore, a project with sub tasks and tags would look exactly like this…

Project Title:
- Task 1 @tagsarelikethis
- Task 2 @errands
- Task 3 @due(july24)

OmniFocus Projects Templates use this same syntax and have added some custom features through the use of tagging. You can read about that syntax here.

OmniFocus Projects can look as simple as the example text above. But they can also use custom placeholders which prompt you to add dynamic data. If you put a string of characters in between the symbols ‘«’ and ‘»’, OmniFocus will treat it like a variable and prompt you to provide it. This means that if tag an item with the tag @due(«dateofperformance»), I will be asked what the date of the performance is, and then OmniFocus will add that due date to any tasks with that tag.

See my Concert Template below for an example.

Notice that most of my due dates have the minus symbol and a number after them followed by ‘d,’ ‘m,’ or ‘w,’ for days, months, and weeks, respectively. This adjusts the due date relative to the date I provide OmniFocus when prompted. Here is an example. When we perform a concert, the high school we feed into usually offers help from student volunteers in their Tri-M chapter. I need to get in touch with the Tri-M President at least 14 days before the date of the concert to ensure they have enough time to prepare, so I have added a -14d to the end of the date tag for that task. OmniFocus will not bother me about the task until that time.

There is also a Defer date tag associated with that same task. I can begin working on that task up to four weeks before it is due, so OmniFocus reveals it to me four weeks in advance, but doesn’t show it as due until I can’t survive the day without having done it.

Adding Projects to OmniFocus with Drafts

You may be wondering how I am actually triggering these templates to initiate in OmniFocus. As stated above, I am storing them all in Drafts. Drafts has a feature where you can create different workspaces for different buckets of text. I store my templates in the OmniFocus Template Workspace. In the image below, you will see a template for taking my band to their annual Assessment performance.

On the right side of Drafts there are some options which perform custom actions on my drafts. Users can create their own custom actions and share them with the community as Action Groups on the Drafts Action Directory. This particular set of actions was made by the brilliant Rosemary Orchard and shared on her blog here, where she also goes into great detail about using these two applications together.

The actions can be installed directly into Drafts. The topmost action is the one that takes the text of the draft and prompts me to add it to OmniFocus. The other actions along the right side add common TaskPaper syntax to the document wherever you cursor is. For example, tapping the ‘Due’ action will type ‘@due().’ This makes templates more fool-proof as you will be less likely to make a mistake with the syntax.

The image above depicts one of the prompts I receive when running the ‘TaskPaper to OmniFocus’ action in Drafts. Scroll to the top of this post to see what the resulting project looks like once it is in OmniFocus.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

I spend most of my time in the Forecast view of OmniFocus which only shows me tasks that are deferred or due for that day, alongside the events in my calendar. Notice in the screenshot below that I don’t think about the deferred tasks on June 24th until I am actually looking at June 24th, thus allowing me to be calm and focused on other tasks on preceding days.

In my post on OmniFocus Perspectives, I talked about how I can focus my view on tasks that are relevant to certain working contexts. With Project Templates, I can focus on only the tasks that are relevant on certain days. They are otherwise out of sight, out of mind. The due dates ensure that I never miss a task.

FileMaker 19 Holds Promise for My Music Teaching Workflow

This isn’t exactly new news anymore, but I wanted to acknowledge that Claris has launched FileMaker 19.

I spend a lot of time in FileMaker. My colleague, Ben Denne, actually designed a FileMaker app that our music team has collaborated on. The app manages a database of our student’s names, a sequential list of all the songs we teach in our classes, concert repertoire, and performance records.

My music team uses FileMaker to track performance records of students, scoring them on simple rubrics. — My music team uses FileMaker to track records of student performances. The database calculates total points earned over the course of each student’s middle school career.

The app is able to log instances of student performances and generate points for them that track their progress over the course of their entire three years of middle school. Ben is coming on my podcast, Music Ed Tech Talk later this week to talk about that with me if you want to learn more.

With FileMaker 19, Claris offers their own syncing service, which could significantly cut down costs and increase sync speed for us (two of our major grievances with our current system, which is provided by a third party company.) It also introduces tons of new features that allow users to extend the app. Two that caught my eye are are a deeper support for JavaScript and, finally, Siri Shortcuts actions!

JavaScript is a widely used language. I can imagine huge potential for integrating FileMaker with other apps and web-services. The Siri Shortcuts support, based on five minutes of tinkering, appears to allow users to donate any script from within any one of their FileMaker apps as a Siri Shortcut action. This could be a huge time saver for me, as scripts require a lot of tapping around in menus to run on the current iPad version of FileMaker.

If Shortcuts were to ever allows users to automate actions without requiring a confirmation tap, I can see myself eliminating some tasks that I do at the end of every school day. For example, every day before I pack up my things, I run a script that emails the parents a performance record for every song their child played for me that day, including which points they received on every song.

The move to FileMaker 19 and a new host server would be a lot of work for our music team, but I look forward to investigating the potential.

Staying On Top of Teaching Responsibilities with OmniFocus Perspectives (OmniFocus Mini-Series)

Teaching is a challenging, multifaceted career. I never end a day feeling like I accomplished everything I was supposed to. But sometimes, software can help! And for my tasks, that software is OmniFocus.

Most of the checkable todo items in my life go in OmniFocus. It is a powerful task app for Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch that is based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. There are 100 reasons I love it. Lately, it’s because I am getting a lot of mileage out of the Perspective feature. Perspectives allow you to build different custom views for how OmniFocus displays your tasks.

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      <figcaption class="image-caption-wrapper">
        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The Forecast Perspective comes installed on OmniFocus. It shows you a convenient day at a glance so that you never need to stress about todos until the day they are due.</p></div>
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A Perspective is kind of like a custom search that you can save. The building blocks will seem similar if you have ever made an email rule.

I have over 1,000 tasks in OmniFocus. My goal with Perspectives is to create windows into my work that empower me to think only about the things that are relevant to me at a given time or in a given situation.

Here are a few Perspectives that are most useful to me.

Priority

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1591740553183-YOHTYFY9LQRW134K14WP/2+-+priority.png" alt="The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention." width="1405" height="1305" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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      <figcaption class="image-caption-wrapper">
        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention.</p></div>
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This Perspective shows me all of my most important tasks. I designed it for moments where I have an overwhelming number of things to do spanning numerous unrelated projects and I just need to focus on the things I can’t survive the day (or moment) without doing. This Perspective is set up to show only tasks that are due soon, overdue, and tasks that are both tagged ‘Today’ and have a flag. The result is a list of tasks that are due soon mixed in with the most important things I want to be working on ‘today.’

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1591740714885-XSMTEMH3SITH76XDCEDH/3+-+priotiry+set+up.png" alt="This is how my Priority Perspective is set up." width="1779" height="1635" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">This is how my Priority Perspective is set up.</p></div>
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There are usually only a few tasks that result from this search which helps my eyes (and brain) focus on top priorities.

Today

This is a project that filters only items with the tag ‘Today.’ These items already show up on my Forecast view alongside overdue and due soon items, but there are times where I do not have any items due that day, or where I they aren’t available yet, resulting in a cluttered looking Forecast. The Today Perspective shows me only a list of things I want to be working on Today, organized by project.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1591740869969-CL1FMPJD11IEWLV4B2YR/4+-+today.png" alt="This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post." width="2289" height="1861" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post.</p></div>
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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1591740916886-2PYLIZB0N84LQFWPSHGE/5+-+today+set+up.png" alt="This is how my Today Perspective is set up." width="1779" height="1635" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">This is how my Today Perspective is set up.</p></div>
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Deferred

This Perspective shows me when certain items became available to begin working on, in the order that they became available. This is useful for seeing if there are tasks that became available a long time ago that I am really slacking on, or maybe that I need to drop and admit I took on too much.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">My Deferred Perspective. Tip - Giving an item a Defer date in OmniFocus means that it isn’t available to work on until that date. You can use these to easily filter only items that are ‘available,’ which can relieve the stress of seeing everything at once.</p></div>
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Teaching

I have numerous projects relating to teaching in the Howard County Public School System. I have action lists for each of my ensembles, for directing the HCPSS Honor Band, for planning concerts, field trips, and for articulating our students from middle to high school. The Teaching Perspective focuses me on only the tasks related to teaching responsibilities, and organizes them by due date. This way I am thinking about only work tasks, while remaining focused on the next task I should be completing.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1591741154885-71XPVMNBWMOYKZJ2TJ2N/7+-+teaching.png" alt="My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work." width="2289" height="1861" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work.</p></div>
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Grading

My school uses Canvas for grading students and Synergy for tracking certain data on them. Both are slow, web-based, programs that take a while to load. For this reason, I tend to want to spend concentrated times working with grades and then ignore them, rather than being constantly in and out of the grade book.

For this reason, I add a lot of grade based tasks to OmniFocus and tag them with keywords like Grades, Canvas, or Synergy. I tend to use these a lot when triaging email. For example, if my school’s data clerk emails teachers with due dates and deadlines for final grades, I forward that into my OmniFocus inbox using my special email address that the app provides. Once it is out of my email inbox and into my OmniFocus inbox I give it a defer date and a due date, and tag it with the tag ‘Canvas.’

Sometimes students email me work if they have issues submitting it on Canvas. Or parents ask me questions in email about certain grades. In these situations, I forward the emails into my OmniFocus inbox and then tag them with the necessary tag.

The Grades Perspective aggregates all of these tags into one view. This is useful because these tasks rarely have hard due dates. By not assigning them due dates, they never clutter up my Forecast perspective (where I spend most of my time). When I am ready to focus on grading, I can open up this Perspective and filter all other tasks out.

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      <figcaption class="image-caption-wrapper">
        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The Grades Perspective shows only responsibilities that involve entering grades and working with my school’s learning management software.</p></div>
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Top 3

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I just need to think “what are three things that I need to focus on today.” This usually happens on days where I need to be spending long periods of serious focus on one or more broad tasks. I often go traditional-task-list and break out a pencil and paper for moments like this. Lately, I use this OmniFocus Perspective called Top 3. I have a tag called “1,” “2,” and “3.” All this Perspective does is filter them so that I don’t see anything else.

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Icons

OmniFocus Perspectives can be given a custom icon that matches the style of the perspective icons that come with the app. I am able to make my Perspectives look really attractive and eye-grabbing with the MacStories Perspective Icons, a new product that features 20,000 icons for OmniFocus. You can read more about them and buy them here.

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Conclusion

OmniFocus has challenged me to think about my own productivity and capacity to focus. Through Perspectives, I am able to build windows into my work that help me to see only what I need to at a given time.

You can read more about OmniFocus here and learn more about building Perspectives from learnomnifocus.com here.

🔗 Concertino- classical music front end for apple music

As much as I love IDAGIO for classical music streaming, it is mostly solving the metadata problem for me. In other words, the issue of being able to sort and filter by time period, composer, conductor, etc.

I still find Apple Music's library for classical to be decent, and I already pay for it.

I am looking forward to trying out Concertino in the coming days.

Concertino – Classical music front-end for Apple Music

Transform Apple Music into a magical classical music jukebox – browse composers, genres and periods, create playlists of multi-movement works, start no-nonsense radio stations and much, much more, for free!

🎙 #9 – Automate All The Things! with Craig McClellan

Craig returns to talk about automating bedtime routines with Shortcuts, HomeKit automation, automating the Mac, our decision to end The Class Nerd podcast, and more.

Show Notes:

HomePods at Best Buy
Apple HomeKit
Robby’s “My Favorite Technology” page – includes all home automation devices and apps he uses at home
Wemo Smart Switch
Lutron Caseta Smart Light Switches
Philips Hue Smart Bulbs
Shortcuts app
AutoSleep sleep tracker
Setting up HomeKit scenes
Mysa Thermostats – for baseboard heating
Honeywell Lyric Alarm System
Robby’s Bedtime Shortcut
Craig’s Bedtime Shortcut
Robby’s Play Podcast in the Master Bathroom Shortcut
Zoom
Drafts
iPad Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro with Trackpad
Robby’s StaffPad Review – First Impressions of StaffPad for iPadOS | robbyburns.com
Music Ed Tech Talk Episode 7 – Working with StaffPad
Music Ed Tech Talk Season 3 Episode 5 – Taking Notes with Drafts, With Greg Pierce
Slack
AppleScript Support for Drafts on the Mac
Shortcuts and Drafts action to save a Draft to Apple Note (You must have both installed)
AppleScript Drafts action to save a Draft to Apple Notes
Alfred
List of actions I use in Alfred every day
- Search Google
- Search files
- Move/Copy Files from one place to another
- Clipboard manager
- Define and spell words
- Search OmniFocus
- Search Drafts
- Message people
- Email People
- Search GIFs on Giphy
- Searching websites
- Searching Emoji
- Jump to Slack Channel
- Music Ed Tech Talk Episode 6 – Paperless iPad Workflows – Discussion of what Markdown is
- Marked 2 app
- Brett Terpstra AppleScripts for Marked 2 and other Projects
Things
Todoist
OmniFocus Automation
Keyboard Maestro
Hazel
Video of my Keyboard Maestro macro for loan agreement forms in action
The Class Nerd Semester 2 Episode 2 – To Automate or Not to Automate – discussion of DEVONthink
Music Ed Tech Talk Season 2 Episode 11 – Automation and Advanced Workflows with Craig McClellan
Music Ed Tech Talk Season 3 Episode 3 – Task App Showdown with Craig McClellan
The Class Nerd Podcast

App of the Week:
Robby – DEVONthink
Craig McClellan – Dark Noise

Album of the Week:
Robby – Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Craig McClellan – Shawn McConnell: Live From Basement East

Where to Find Us:
Craig McClellan: Twitter | Website
Robby Burns: Twitter | Blog

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Show Notes:

Show Notes:

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Screenshots of Our FileMaker Database:

Our table of assignment records (Right) and the Layout we use to enter performance records (Left)

Example of the music packets that FileMaker generates for our students:

Why Project Templates?

What is TaskPaper?

Adding Projects to OmniFocus with Drafts

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Priority

Today

Deferred

Teaching

Grading

Top 3

Icons

Conclusion

Show Notes:

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