#55 – MuseClass, with Bob Chreste

New podcast episode!!!

Bob Chreste joins the show to talk about MuseClass, a free musical assessment management platform from MuseGroup.

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Thanks to my sponsors this month, Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks.

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Overcast

Album of the Week:
Robby – Black Radio III – Robert Glasper)
Bob – Via Havana walking horsley

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby – Make a keyboard shortcut for any menu item on macOS
Bob – Chrome tab groups

Where to Find Me:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book

Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!

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.

🎙Music Ed Tech Talk Episode #29 – Develop Performance Skills with Cloud Software

Robby explains how he uses Noteflight, Soundtrap, and Flipgrid to create engaging, asynchronous, assignments for students in his performing ensembles.

Show Notes

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🎙 Music Ed Tech Talk #27 – Catching Up With Shawna Longo, with Shawna Longo

Shawna Longo joins the show to talk about our hybrid teaching gear, social emotional learning, cloud-based music tools, and our favorite apps/albums/tech tips of the week.

Topics include:

COVID hybrid teaching strategies
Teaching hardware (on a cart!)
Teaching performance virtually
social emotional learning
music tools in the cloud
the Canvas mastery grade book

Show Notes:

Tech Tips of the Week:
Robby – Command+K (or Control+K) will create a hyperlink
Shawna – Mute All for Google Meet | Use AirPod mic as input in Google Meet

App of the Week:
Robby – TIDAL
Shawna – Scannable

Album of the Week:
Robby – Future Nostalgia – Dua Lipa
Shawna – Happiness Begins – The Jonas Brothers

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Shawna – Twitter | Website

Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!

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🎬 Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software

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I have been meaning to write about “what I have been doing for online learning” since the fall.

This has proven difficult for many reasons, mostly that there is a lot I have been doing and it is all interconnected.

Generally, my planning and technology use has fallen into two categories.

Tech that supports synchronous classes (via Zoom/Google Meet/etc.)
Tech that supports the asynchronous work (via LMS, cloud-based and student-facing software, etc.)

Fortunately, I was invited to present at two music conferences this year, MMEA and TMEA, and each of my accepted sessions has serendipitously aligned with each of those areas.

This presentation in the video above is an overview of the asynchronous part. In other words, how I am keeping my virtual instruction focused on playing instruments solo, through student-facing tools like Noteflight, Soundtrap, Flipgrid, and a handful of iOS utility apps.

These strategies were developed while I was teaching virtually but they can just as easily be used in a hybrid or in-person teaching model. I would argue that they are just as valuable in either of those environments.

This presentation was first given at TMEA on Saturday, February 14th, 2021.

You can view the notes to this session here.

Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software (Session Notes) – TMEA 2021 | Saturday, February 13

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.

About Robby Burns

Website – robbyburns.com

Blog – Music Ed Tech Talk (musicedtechtalk.com)

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Apple Silicon, Macs in Education, and App-Centric Learning

Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.

Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple’s relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.

Making the Grade: What will Apple Silicon mean for Apple’s education strategy? – 9to5Mac:

I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.

I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.

I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!

Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn’t exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple’s vision for an “app-centric” model were the norm instead of the “web-centric” model we have now.

Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.

Using Drafts and TextExpander to Organize Lesson Notes

I am moving more of my text notes to Drafts these days. You can read about how I use Drafts here. Drafts is a note-taking app where most of my text typing starts. When I am ready to act upon my text, the actions on the right side of the screen allow me to send it off to messages, emails, tasks, notes, social media, and more.

Generally, I use Drafts as a text-inbox, where I eventually process all of my text ideas and send them to other apps that are better suited for them. But lately, I wonder why I need to take the extra step of sending a draft to another app when Drafts is perfectly suited for organizing and searching text.

Let’s take Lesson Notes, for example. When I teach a sectional, large ensemble, or private lesson, I like to take notes on what we played and what I assigned. Usually, I would type these in Drafts and then send the finished text to Apple Notes. But lately, I am just keeping it in Drafts and archiving it so that it doesn’t clutter up the inbox area. Everything is in plaintext so searching my entire 7,000 draft library is way faster than searching Apple Notes. Plus, it reduces the amount of time I ever even need to open Apple Notes by 90 percent.

I add the tag “sectionals” to a draft where I have taken sectional notes, and I have a custom workspace that allows me to see just the drafts with that tag.

Additionally, tagging them “badge” makes it so that the draft doesn’t contribute to the number on the red badge of the Drafts icon. I use the badge only to inform me of drafts that need to be processed to another app.

I write most of my drafts in Markdown, which means I use “#” symbols to note levels of the heading, “**” to indicate things I want bold, etc… If you want to read more about how I use Markdown, read this post. Drafts and common web editing tools like WordPress (and even Canvas) can turn this Markdown into HTML. I only use Markdown for my sectional notes to show bullet-pointed lists and first/second-level headings. Drafts does some light formatting to help me better see this information by, for example, highlighting the headings green.

It gets tedious to retype this template for every class, so I have TextExpander snippets to do it for me. Read about how I am using TextExpander here.

In the case of the snippet below, I type “sectionalnotes” into the body of the draft and then TextExpander prompts me for the ensemble and sectional name and then automatically fills in that data, with my fill-ins and the current date.

Using an action called Current UUID, I can copy a link to a draft to my clipboard and paste it in to the calendar event for whatever class, lesson, or sectional it is related to. That way, I can easily refer to it by date, using the visually friendly interface of a calendar app.

METT Episode #18 – Productivity Boot Camp (Part I): Notes and Tasks, with Dr. Frank Buck

Thanks to my sponsors this month, Flat for Education.

Dr. Frank Buck returns to the show for the kick-off of my mini-series, Productivity Boot Camp! Dr. Frank Buck is a productivity master with a background in band directing and administration. I share my knowledge of Apple products and native third-party apps, and he shares his experience with web-based, cross-platform apps. We bounce back and forth about good digital task and note management and share our favorite apps!

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Sticky Widgets
Frank Buck – Feedly

Album of the Week:
Robby – The Lost Art of Longing | BT
Frank Buck – Handel Flute Sonata V – Recording of Dr. Frank Buck Performing

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Frank Buck – Twitter | Website

Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!

Subscribe to the Blog

Subscribe to the Podcast in…
Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Flat for Education:

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, Bands 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

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.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">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!</p></div>
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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.

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      <figcaption class="image-caption-wrapper">
        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">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!</p></div>
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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.

Support Music Ed Tech Talk

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About Robby Burns

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Show Notes:

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