Top 10 Apps for Music Teachers in 2023

New YouTube video. Links to all apps below.

iOS 15 and Safari Extensions

iOS 15 came out recently. I am working on an episode of Music Ed Tech Talk that will cover this in more detail, along with the thoughts on the forthcoming version of macOS.

iOS 15 comes with a lot of new features that are worth checking out, one of which is Safari extensions.

Safari extensions allow for a variety of customizations typically popular on desktop browsing experiences, and particularly, Chrome.

Here are some of my favorite iOS 15 browser extensions so far:

1Password – this extension allows 1Password to fill in your passwords for you, using a similar user interface to the desktop version of the app
Achoo HTML – displays the HTML of the web page you are currently on
Amplosion – redirects AMP links to their normal counterparts
Grammarly – identifies silly grammatical errors in fields on websites
Noir – adds dark mode to websites that don’t otherwise have it
Apollo – opens Reddit URLs in the (superior) app Apollo instead of Safari

Of course, there are a lot of good content blocking extensions too like StopTheMadness, 1Blocker, and Super Agent for Safari.

For other kinds of hacks, utilities, and tweaks, check out Reload All Tabs, Vidimote, xSearch, and PiPifier.

METT Episode #42 – Pass the Baton, with Theresa Hoover

There’s a new episode of Music Ed Tech Talk out!

Theresa Hoover returns to talk about career changing, COVID practices worth bringing into this school year, productivity apps, and empowering student creativity!

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Thanks to my sponsors this month, Blink Session Music.

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Instapaper / Readwise
Theresa – Kumospace

Album of the Week:
Robby – Turbo
Theresa – Cory Wong

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby – Safari Tab Groups, Sync Safari and Chrome bookmarks with a Windows PC
Theresa – Chrome Reading List / Favicons Favorite Bar

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

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

Attendance for Google Meet | A Chrome Extension That Automatically Takes Your Attendance for You and Saves It to a Google Sheet

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.

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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!

Well it has taken me long enough… This past week, Apple held an education event. Below are some brief thoughts on the subject. Chris Russell is coming on my podcast later this week to talk about all of the details. Keep in mind, I do not work in a school with 1:1 iPads or any kind of deployment strategy. But I am very seriously invested in Apple’s role in education and their vision for how their products fit into the classroom.

New iPad

This device looks great. Adding the Apple Pencil to this model will be an asset for schools. But will schools really pay 89 dollars for a pencil after just having purchased numerous 250 dollar iPads?

The thing that gets me most excited about this device is its consumer potential. I am tempted to buy one for myself as a (more) mobile counterpart to my larger 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

iWork Updates

Apple Pencil support. FINALLY. This was my favorite announcement of the day. I anticipate editing Pages documents, scribbling on bus attendance lists made in Numbers, and annotating Keynote slides at the front of the classroom on a daily basis. I hate to be cynical (which the rest of this post will be), but Microsoft Office for iPad has had the ability to write on documents with an Apple Pencil since the Apple Pencil launched, two years ago.

iBooks Author

Seems like the Mac app is no longer going to receive development. All book publishing features have been moved to Pages for iOS and Mac. It doesn’t appear that the new feature does everything that iBooks Author can do. Hopefully this is like when Apple rewrote Final Cut Pro X, took away some features, but then eventually added them back. Or when iWork was rewritten to be the same for iOS and macOS, stripping AppleScript features from the Mac, but eventually bringing them back. I would hate to see iBook authors unable to use workflows they have in the past using iBooks Author for the Mac.

Classroom App for Mac

Apple’s learning management system comes to the Mac. Great! But what took so long? And can Apple keep up with the vastly more mature and flexible Google Classroom? (See conclusion below)

School Work App

An app for teachers to give assignments to students, check their progress, and collect it back. School Work can route students to other apps to do their assignments using the ClassKit API which is very cool. But why is this separate from the Classroom app? And where does iTunes U fit into all of this?

Conclusion

Apple is making a lot of solid efforts here but a lot of it it feels like too little too late, especially the student and learning management software. I really do hope they can keep up with Google Classroom who has been eating everyone’s lunch for years. Apple will have to be aggressive about adding new features to all of these new apps and making sure that their app ecosystem is flexible enough to compete with Chromebooks which use browser based software. Yes, there are way more apps on the App Store than there are Chrome based apps, but in education (and especially in music education) a lot of the big players are writing for Chrome OS. To me, the draw of Chromebooks in education is not their price, but the flexibility of web based software.

Apple’s software engineers seem spread very thin and unable to balance the release of various applications, consistently over time. This is true of many of Apple’s consumer apps. Mail and Reminders, two tentpole productivity apps have fallen way behind the competition. Calendar has not seen any more than a few major feature updates since I started using the Mac back in 2006. Apple’s apps are part of the “nice” factor of being in the ecosystem. Sometimes an app like Notes will get some major new features, but then we won’t hear from it for a few years. Google’s apps, by contrast, lack the same design sense, but are constantly being updated with new features. And they are not locked into annual OS updates like iOS is. In my opinion, this is Apple’s biggest problem right now.

Ironically, software is still my draw to Apple products. Even though their hardware is the most indisputably good thing they are doing right now (I am nearly without complaint of my iPhone X and the iPad 10.5 is perfect), it is the software that locks me in. In other words, I am much more committed to macOS and iOS than I am Mac and iPhone. This leaves me with some long term concern about my interest in continuing to use Apple products. And great concern about any educational institution who jumps on the iPad bandwagon just because apps are bright and colorful and demo well on stage. Apple has to show continual support for their education software if their dream for the classroom is to come true.

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