Next, I’d like to talk about apps to help you manage your time and save your ideas digitally.
Put Only Hard Commitments in Your Calendar
Managing your time is a key part of being a music educator. Sometimes it feels like we have more responsibilities than there is actually time in the day to complete.
In “Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators,” I recommend apps to help you wrangle your to-do list. Now I would like to recommend some apps and tips for managing the events on your calendar.
If your calendar needs are simple, I recommend you go no further than Google. It runs entirely in a web browser but can also be used in combination with your calendar app of choice. My music team uses a Google Calendar to publish all of our classes, sectionals, concerts, and events. This allows us to edit this data right from our calendar apps on our phones and computers, while also publishing them to a website for parents to view.
Google Calendar works perfectly fine for most needs. It is available to anyone for free on the web and has a functional mobile app on most smartphone platforms.
Microsoft Outlook and the Apple Calendars, despite being created by big tech companies, are actually capable of showing you a calendar from any service (Google included). My personal calendars are in iCloud, and our school uses Exchange. I can log into my iCloud, Google, and Exchange calendars all from within the same app to see everything I am committed to.
Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook are two of the most widely used calendar apps on desktop and mobile operating systems. Either of them can handle calendars from Google, iCloud, or Exchange accounts and show them all alongside one another.
Tip!—Avoid putting tasks in your calendar. Tasks have due dates, but they rarely need to be worked on at a specific time. I find that putting tasks in my calendar adds lots of noise and I eventually just end up ignoring all of it. If you want to stay sane, put only time-based appointments on your calendar. You can make an appointment with yourself to tackle a big task, but try to avoid putting things like “print concert programs” and “design seating chart” alongside events with concrete start and end times.
If you want more power out of your calendars, I recommend you check out Fantastical. (Currently iOS and Mac only. Android users can check out SolCalendar). Here are my favorite features:
Natural language input is not only fast, but you can set a keyboard shortcut on your computer to invoke a mini-calendar for quickly adding events.
Natural language input: Typing “Choir Rehearsal tomorrow at 7 pm @2032 Beaverton Road /Work” will add an event called Choir Rehearsal to your calendar at the designated time and location. The “/Work” will put on the “Work” calendar.
Calendar Sets: I subscribe to my school and school district’s master calendar to better plan after-school rehearsals, concerts, and space use. I subscribe to these calendars in Fantastical, but I have them toggled off by default. I created a Calendar Set called “All” that turns on the chaos and shows me every single calendar I have at once. Many things overlap, but it enables me to be informed as I plan without needing to visit my district’s website.
Conference Call Detection: Fantastical also has built-in Zoom and Google Meet integration. If it detects a meeting URL in the calendar event, it adds a one-touch button to the event which will launch you right into the meeting. This event was shared with me and has a Zoom call URL associated with it. Fantastical automatically added the Zoom icon so that I can click on it to immediately enter the call. Fantastical integrates with all of these services.
A handful of Fantastical’s features are free, and some of the more advanced features are paid.
Other great calendar apps:
Quickly Clip Ideas from Everywhere
There is much to say about note apps. The one feature I see least utilized by busy teachers is the clipper. A clipper is a tool that runs in the Share Sheet of your phone or as a web extension. Clippers are perfect for “saving it for later.” A good one can handle mixed media including photos, websites, emails, text notes, files, and more. Here are my favorite apps that have easy ways to capture data for later:
Evernote: Known for being cross-platform and having a free tier. Its web extension can grab almost anything from the web and clip it to your notebook in a neatly formatted article view that is text searchable. The Evernote web clipper can be installed as an extension or from the share-sheet on mobile devices. You can choose how it will save the content, and even categorize it with tags and a memo before clipping.
Microsoft OneNote: Similar features to Evernote. It’s free if your district has Office 365. Plays nice with the rest of the Office Suite.
Apple Notes: Apple Notes has caught up with most of the major features of competing note apps. From almost anywhere on an iOS or Mac device, press the Share button to save something to Apple Notes. Almost any type of media can be clipped.
Drafts: Drafts is text-only, but I prefer it for my note-taking because I can capture quickly and then easily send the text out to other apps once I have decided where it belongs.
Google Keep: Leverages all smart AI features and integration with Google Services that you would expect. Google Keep is simple, but it provides plenty of features. Notes can be turned into reminders, Google Docs, or shared with others.
Instapaper: Primarily for saving web content like news articles. It strips out the ads, buttons, and other chrome, so you get an experience less like reading a website and more like reading a newspaper.
Of these apps, Evernote is most able to handle whatever kind of data you throw at it. Because it’s available on the web, it’s easy to share your data with others and even get your data out and into another app, if you choose to.
Before and after a website has been parsed by Instapaper’s clipper.
Tip!—In the same way I try to avoid putting tasks on my calendar, I also try to avoid clipping things I want to check out later to my to-do list. It clutters things up. I put only actionable tasks on my task list. If it doesn’t have a verb (“email Jacklyn choir rosters for 2021–22,” “tune the bass drum,” “draft grant proposal”), save it to a note instead.
I will be going on Facebook Live with composer David MacDonald on Sunday at 5 pm EST. We are going to be discussing tech that we have recently been using in our respective music teaching jobs.
Richard McCready returns to the show to bring in the new year. We reflect on what we learned over the past year and discuss how music teachers can challenge their perception of tradition, creativity, and learning process, moving forward. Of course we also share our app and album picks of the week.
Do you have a product, app, or service that you would like to promote?
I am now offering sponsorships for the blog and podcast! A sponsorship includes…
An ad pinned to the sidebar of this blog (my thanks to this month’s sponsor, Flat for Education!)
A blog post about your product in my feed. You can provide the copy. If you wish, I can test your product and add some of my own experiences to the post.
An ad read on one episode of my podcast. Again, you provide the copy, but it is read conversationally in the middle of my show, not like a commercial. I speak to my own experiences if I have them.
I am open to all kinds of sponsorships. The audience of the blog and podcast are musicians and educators, often active music teachers, who are generally tech-savvy. Many of them use multiple computing devices, aren’t afraid to try new tech, and are looking for practical ways to engage their students musically.
Naturally, software that enhances the creative and productive lives of musicians and teachers is a good fit but I am open to sponsorships of a much wider variety than just that. Music stores, colleges, fundraisers, books, you name it!
If you want to be a sponsor, or if you want more details, choose Contact in the navigation bar of this site and leave me a message!
And if you don’t have a reason to sponsor the site in this way, but you want to support my continued hosting costs and motivation to keep producing content, check out my Buy Me a Coffee page. I appreciate any and all support!
When school let out in March, I wrote My Very Straightforward and Very Successful Setup for Teaching Virtual Private Lessons. The impetus for this post, and its snarky title, was an overwhelming number of teachers I saw on Facebook fussing about what apps and hardware they should use to teach online when all you really need is a smartphone, FaceTime, and maybe a tripod.
I stand by that post. But there are also reasons to go high-tech. I have had a lot of time this summer to reflect on the coming fall teaching semester. I have been experimenting with software and hardware solutions that are going to make my classes way more engaging.
Zoom
I have been hesitant about Zoom. I still have reservations about their software. Yet, it is hard to resist how customizable their desktop version is. I will be using Google Meet for my public school classes in September, but for my private lessons, I have been taking advantage of Zoom’s detailed features and settings.
For example, it’s easier to manage audio ins and outs. Right from the chat window, I can change if my voice input is going through my Mac’s internal microphone or my studio microphone, or if video is coming from my laptop webcam or my external Logitech webcam. This will also be useful for routing audio from apps into the call (we will get to that in a moment).
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">Zoom allows you to choose the audio/video input from right within the call.</p></div>
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Zoom also allows you to AirPlay the screen of an iOS device to the student as a screen sharing option. This is the main reason I have been experimenting with Zoom. Providing musical feedback is challenging over an internet-connected video call. Speaking slowly helps to convey thoughts accurately, but it helps a lot more when I say “start at measure 32” and the student sees me circle the spot I want them to start in the music, right on their phone.
You can get really detailed by zooming in and out of scores and annotating as little as a single note. If you are wondering, I am doing all of this on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, using the forScore app. A tight feedback loop of “student performance—>teacher feedback—>student adjustment” is so important to good teaching, and a lot of it is lost during online lessons. It helps to get some of it back through the clarity and engagement of annotated sheet music.
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">Selecting AirPlay as a screen sharing option.</p></div>
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">AirPlaying annotated sheet music to the Zoom call using the iPad Pro and forScore app.</p></div>
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As much as I love this, I still think Zoom is pretty student hostile, particularly with the audio settings. Computers already try to normalize audio by taking extreme louds and compressing them. Given that my private lessons are on percussion instruments, this is very bad. Zoom is the worst at it of all the video apps I have used. To make it better, you have to turn on an option in the audio settings called “Use Original Audio” so that the host hears the student’s raw sound, not Zoom’s attempt to even it out. Some of my students report that they have to re-choose this option in the “Meeting Settings” of each new Zoom call.
If this experiment turns out to be worth it for the sheet music streaming, I will deal with it. But this is one of the reasons why I have been using simple apps like FaceTime up until this point.
I have been experimenting with a few apps by Rogue Amoeba that give me more control over how audio is flowing throughout my hardware and software.
Last Spring, I would often play my public school students YouTube videos, concert band recordings from Apple Music, and warm-up play-alongs that were embedded in Keynote slides. I was achieving this by having the sound of these sources come out of my computer speakers and right back into the microphone of my laptop. It actually works. But not for everyone. And not well.
Loopback is an app by Rogue Amoeba that allows you to combine the audio input and output of your various microphones, speakers, and apps, into new single audio devices that can be recognized by the system. I wrote about it here. My current set up includes a new audio device I created with Loopback which combines my audio interface and a bunch of frequently used audio apps into one. The resulting device is called Interface+Apps. If I select it as the input in my computer’s sound settings, then my students hear those apps and any microphone plugged into my audio interface directly. The audio quality of my apps is therefore more pure and direct, and there is no risk of getting an echo or feedback effect from my microphone picking up my computer speaker’s sound.
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">A Loopback device I created which combines the audio output of many apps with my audio interface into a new, compound device called “Interface+Apps.”</p></div>
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">I can select this compound device from my Mac’s Sound settings.</p></div>
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Now I can do the following with a much higher level of quality…
Run a play-along band track and have a private student drum along
Play examples of professional bands for my band class on YouTube
Run Keynote slides that contain beats, tuning drones, and other play-along/reference tracks
and…
Logic Pro X
Logic Pro X is one of my apps routing through to the call via Loopback. I have a MIDI keyboard plugged into my audio interface and a Roland Octopad electronic drum pad that is plugged in as an audio source (though it can be used as a MIDI source too).
The sounds on the Roland Octopad are pretty authentic. I have hi-hat and bass drum foot pedal triggers so I can play it naturally. So in Logic, I start with an audio track that is monitoring the Octopad, and a software instrument track that is set to a piano (or marimba or xylophone, whatever is relevant). This way, I can model drum set or mallet parts for students quickly without leaving my desk. The audio I produce in Logic is routed through Loopback directly into the call. My students say the drum set, in particular, sounds way better in some instances than the quality of real instruments over internet-connected calls. Isn’t that something…
Obviously, there is a reason I have previously recommended a set up as simple as a smartphone and a tripod stand. Smartphones are very portable and convenient. And simple smartphone apps like FaceTime and Google Duo make a lot of good default choices about how to handle audio without the fiddly settings some of the more established “voice conference” platforms are known for.
Furthermore, I can’t pick up my desk and move it to my timpani or marimba if I need to model something. So I have begun experimenting with multiple camera angles. I bought a webcam back in March (it finally just shipped). I can use this as a secondary camera to my laptop’s camera (Command+Shift+N in Zoom to change cameras).
Alternatively, I can share my iPhone screen via AirPlay and turn on the camera app. Now I can get up from my desk and go wherever I need to. The student sees me wherever I go. This option is sometimes laggy.
Alternatively, I can log in to the call separately on the iPhone and Mac. This way, there are two instances of me, and if I need to, I can mute the studio desk microphone, and use the phone microphone so that students can hear me wherever I go. I like this option the best because it has the added benefit of showing me what meeting participants see in Zoom.
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">Logging in to the Zoom call on the Mac and iPhone gives me two different camera angles.</p></div>
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SoundSource
This process works well once it is set up. But it does take some fiddling around with audio ins and outs to get it right. SoundSource is another app by Rogue Amoeba that takes some of the fiddly-ness out of the equation. It replaces the sound options in your Mac’s menubar, offering your more control and more ease at the same time.
This app saved me from digging into the audio settings of my computer numerous times. In addition to putting audio device selection at a more surface level, it also lets you control the individual volume level of each app, apply audio effects to your apps, and more. One thing I do with it regularly is turn down the volume of just the Zoom app when my students play xylophone.
Rogue Amoeba’s apps will cost you, but they are worth it for those who want more audio control on the Mac. Make sure you take advantage of their educator discount.
EDIT: My teaching set up now includes the use of OBS and an Elago Stream Deck. Read more here.
Conclusion
I went a little overboard here. If this is overwhelming to you, don’t get the idea that you need to do it all. Anyone of these tweaks will advance your setup and teaching.
This post is not specific about the hardware I use. If you care about the brands and models of my gear, check out My Favorite Technology to read more about the specific audio equipment in my setup.
UPDATE: Listen to Theresa’s appearance on my podcast and subscribe below…
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyRSS FeedTheresa Hoover Ducassoux is a band director in Virginia doing awesome work ensuring that her students are engaged and empowered in her band classes, online and in person. She is especially savvy with a lot of the web-based tech tools that are popular in education right now.
Her post, which I have linked and quoted below, explains some ways you might use Google’s Jamboard app in the music classroom to engage students.
Jamboard is one of the newer and lesser-known G Suite tools, but it’s one that I love and am excited to use this school year! Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard that be accessed by an app or web browser. The simplicity of the tool makes it great for education. Jamboard is a great way to have all students in your class share their voices.
Jamboard is indeed excellent. I used it for a number of things last spring. One way we used it was to communicate and share what we had been up to in our free time when school started online.
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<div class="image-caption"><p class="">I used this Jamboard our first day of online learning to ask students how they had been spending their extra time at home. Each section of the band had a page of the digital whiteboard to edit.</p></div>
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Another way we used it was as an adjudication tool for providing ourselves feedback on our virtual ensemble video progress. You can see a brief snippet of that process in the middle of my How to Make a Virtual Band video, below.
Go and check out Theresa’s post, and all of her fine work at Off The Beaten Path Music. Spoiler: She is my podcast guest this week. Jamboard is just one of the many awesome tools and online teaching strategies we talk about. I learned a ton from her. That episode should be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!
This month I wrote a guest post for Midnight Music, an awesome blog and website designed to equip music teachers with technology knowledge and resources.
The post includes about 10 of the productivity apps I use to create, organize, and collaborate on lesson plans in the music classroom. The list covers some of the web tools and native iOS/Mac apps that are most indispensable to my work as a teacher.
Click the link below to head on over to Midnight Music and read the whole thing.
Everyone likes to organize themselves differently. Teachers prefer different tools, organization methods, and preference over how much of their workflow is digital. Whatever your approach, there are a handful of great apps that can help you create your plans, search them, group them, and collaborate on them. The following apps are some of my favorite tools for managing lesson ideas, plans and resources.
Many of them have similar features as one another, but all of them have unique strengths. My philosophy is that there is always a better and more specific tool for the job.
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.
Amy Burns does some great writing for mustech.net. She is writing to the elementary general music classroom in the blog post linked below, but I think her tips and strategies will resonate with music teachers of every variety. Be sure to check out her blog and subscribe!
This question is excellent and is asked often. When I was performing research for a keynote address I gave recently titled, “How Technology is Transforming the Way We Teach Elementary General Music Classes”, I directly addressed this question. When reading numerous Facebook music education boards, there is a divide on this topic. Music educators will comment on how technology can enhance certain activities like composition and music making for those who have limited abilities. Others will state that their music classroom is a “screen free” zone because students need a break from screens. While others are expected to utilize technology to address 21st century skills or their schools have become 1:1 (one device per student).
I use my iPad for getting work done more and more everyday. There are still a lot of hurdles in the software for getting work done. I think Federico has done a great job illustrating how some of these problems could be solved in an elegant way that doesn’t confuse the intuitive nature of iOS.
I will loose my mind if Apple announces a file management feature anything like the Finder demoed in this video. Apple’s developer conference kicks off with a keynote at 1 pm on June 5 where they are expected to announce next years iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS feature updates. Announcements of some hardware products, including a Siri powered speaker to rival the Amazon Echo, are also rumored to appear.
Google Calendar works perfectly fine for most needs. It is available to anyone for free on the web and has a functional mobile app on most smartphone platforms.
Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook are two of the most widely used calendar apps on desktop and mobile operating systems. Either of them can handle calendars from Google, iCloud, or Exchange accounts and show them all alongside one another.
Natural language input is not only fast, but you can set a keyboard shortcut on your computer to invoke a mini-calendar for quickly adding events.
This event was shared with me and has a Zoom call URL associated with it. Fantastical automatically added the Zoom icon so that I can click on it to immediately enter the call. 
Fantastical integrates with all of these services.
The Evernote web clipper can be installed as an extension or from the share-sheet on mobile devices. You can choose how it will save the content, and even categorize it with tags and a memo before clipping.
Google Keep is simple, but it provides plenty of features. Notes can be turned into reminders, Google Docs, or shared with others.
Music Ed Tech Talk 