What I've Been Up To Lately

The exam room in Calgary SW last week. How appropriate!

This summer is one of those times where so many projects are in development and coming up to completion that it can be difficult to take stock of exactly how things fit in perspective. Here's a short list of my current and recent projects:

• Finishing up a tour of duty examining in southern Alberta this month, after previous trips to Vancouver, Surrey, Trail, and Nelson in BC this June. 
• Working as Artistic Consultant alongside producer Anton Kwiatkowski for the recordings for the upcoming 2015 Piano Syllabus of the Royal Conservatory. Pianists performing on the series include Li Wang, Lang Ning Liu, Robert Kortgaard, Peter Longworth, Michael Esch, Ben Smith, and Janet Lopinski.
• In collaboration with RCM Senior Academic Director Janet Lopinski, rewriting the technical requirements for the 2015 Piano Syllabus, as well as expanding the scope of the technique books for the next edition.
• Finishing up the work compiling the repertoire lists for the 2015 Piano Syllabus.
• OK, this is one of the coolest ones - performing the musical samples for the online component of the Four Star Sight Reading and Ear Training series, 2015 edition. This includes playing intervals, chords, chord progressions, clapbacks, and playbacks which will be available online for anyone who buys the book. The online component will be awesome!
• Finally, I made my podcasting debut in June in conversation with Andrea Dow for Teach Piano Today. Have a listen to Episode 18, where I talk to Andrea about teaching and learning collaborative piano, careers in music, using technology, and being in the curriculum creation business.

Being a foodie in Vancouver.
Picture credit: Karen Lee-Morlang

And that's not even the projects I've got on deck for the fall (more later)...

So this summer has been a fascinating time of taking stock of projects about to finish as well as planning new ones for the fall. At the same time, I've been thinking about how I aim to approach this blog in light of how busy I've been lately. Much of my blog output seems to be in fits and spurts in between busy project times. 

I've been receiving a lot of email from people eager to get press and reviews for their products. It seems that this is a weird time, with traditional press no longer reviewing CDs the way they used to. There's an arms race going on with education apps, with the big winners being the teachers (and their students) who are able to fit these apps and their workflows into their teaching and practice. 

I'm particularly fascinated by the way technology fits into the teaching and practice process, not just as cool new things to amaze teachers at conferences, but as a way of utilizing these apps and devices to integrate seamlessly into the learning process. That's the kind of approach I would like to be taking in my articles in the next while.

And of course there will be giveaways as well. But now it's time for me to take a well-deserved break on a Sunday evening, with two full days of examining in Alberta remaining before I return to Toronto on Wednesday evening. 

The view from the Prince's Island pedestrian bridge last week in Calgary

How to Use Evernote to Track Student Progress and Send Lesson Notes

Many of us have heard a litany of complaints regarding forgotten practice assignments:

• “What do you mean I was supposed to learn this study?” 
• “I didn't know you wanted me to play the second half of the Minuet hands together.” 
• “My notebook? I lost it somewhere under a pile of stuff near my piano.”

The traditional notebook has been a mainstay of piano lessons for decades. A teacher's scrawled instructions form the basis for a student's daily practice habits through the week - if they even bother to look at it. Compounding the problem is the hands-off approach of many parents these days, all too eager to leave Junior to his own musical devices. If he would be organized to actually find his lesson notebook, that is.

To make matters worse, a teacher's lesson planning using paper notebooks requires writing a second set of notes compiled away from the lesson in order to be prepared for the next week. In my early years of teaching I found this duplication of student's and teacher's notes inefficient and difficult to manage with a large studio.

Given the portability of laptops and tablets in the last few years as well as the ubiquity of internet connections in studio spaces, I've seized upon a quick and easy solution to this problem: emailing lesson notes every week.

If you're looking to make the big switch to emailed lesson notes, there are several things you need to have in place in order that your use of technology can be as smooth and transparent as possible:

• a fast and reliable wired or wireless internet connection 
• an up-to-date laptop or tablet 
• a thorough enough knowledge of the program you're using that you don't need to spend any time figuring it out during lesson time 

Over the years, I've developed a quick and streamlined approach to providing lesson notes that is inseparable from my teaching process, my weekly preparation, and the experience of my students in the studio and in the practice room.

I use a program called Evernote to collect, organize, and send my lesson notes. Evernote works on nearly every type of desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device whether it's on the Windows, OSX, iOS, or Android platforms. Within Evernote, I create a notebook exclusively for lesson notes, which I call “Progress Reports”. Each student gets an individual note. Within each note is the following:

1. At the top of the note, a list of email addresses that I send the individual note to each week. With younger students, the email goes out to as many people as possible that need to be kept in the loop regarding a student's progress: both parents, the students themselves if they have an account, as well as older siblings or grandparents if they have practice monitor responsibilities.
2. A listing of major goals or milestones for the student to achieve within a certain timeframe. These can be general, (“this month we'll be working on rhythmic accuracy”) or more specific (“memorize all repertoire by June 1”), as well as housekeeping items (“register for the Grade 5 exam by next Friday”). 
3. A weekly listing of lesson notes with the most recent lesson coming at the top. This is the beauty of the system. It's easy to track development through the year because notes from multiple lessons are listed vertically on the same document. Since parent, student, and teachers are all referring to the same document, they can be on the same page regarding how things have been going and what to work towards next. When I'm planning lessons, the information is right at hand so it's much more efficient to plot the next step in a student's direction. 

With Evernote, multimedia files can be attached based on a student's requirements. For example, young students whose parents don't play an instrument may need audio recordings of their pieces for the week. Evernote has the functionality to make an audio recording within the note. If we're working with a magnet board to review a theoretical concept, I can take a picture of the student's work and attach it to the note.

When I'm teaching, I have either my laptop or iPad close at hand so that I can type items as they arise in the lesson. At the conclusion of every lesson, it only takes a few minutes to send the note to all the emails listed at the top of the note.

Once the student and parent receive the emailed note, they can utilize it in several different ways, some of which were unintended but fortuitous:

• print out the email and refer to it in practice sessions 
• refer to the lesson notes on a smartphone while practicing (teenaged students find this particularly useful) 
• some parents copy and paste the current lesson's notes onto a separate document, formatting it for emphasis in order to make my weekly expectations as clear as possible. 

I've found that using this system has helped me to retain students for longer time frames and is a major marketing point when I interview new families. The personal guidance that students receive from emailed weekly lesson notes can make your studio considerably more attractive from a value and customer service point of view, and the commitment to pedagogical process evident from your work will help to increase the professionalism of your studio.

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Note: this article will also be appearing in the winter issues of the CFMTA's Canadian Music Teacher Magazine and the BCRMTA's Progressions magazine. 

If you have any specific questions about how I use Evernote, leave a comment below and I would be glad to respond. I'll also do some follow-up posts with examples of lesson notes and more details of my Evernote setup for teaching. 

Using a Tablet as a Whiteboard

One of the most useful ways to use a tablet in the studio is as a portable whiteboard for explaining concepts and processes. The sketches below were drawn on the S-Note app on my new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 this morning in order to demonstrate the bass motion of cadences to an RCM Grade 10 student working on ear training. If you have an iPad, there are lots of apps that can provide this kind of functionality as long as you don't mind using a thicker capacitive pen.

Then again, using technology in the studio isn't all about bells and whistles. Take a look at my recent Clavier Companion article about the real reason you should be using technology in the studio. 

Practicing Just Got Social: Three Services To Help Both Students and Teachers

Remember the days when practicing an instrument required enforced seclusion from everybody else in your life? My early years of practice were rich and rewarding, but I tended to keep all my observations entirely to myself. With a new crop of online services, the inner life of practicing is quickly becoming a highly socialized activity, subtly intertwined with their teacher's agenda, the educational aims of software, and the game-like activity of watching one's own practicing in relation to what others are doing with theirs.

Three services in particular stand out in this niche, each with their own take on the relationship of teacher to student, their take on the pedagogical process, and the degree of social interaction between students. 

Music Teacher's Helper

The most mature of the programs in this space, Music Teacher's Helper has been on the scene for several years now and has had time to branch out from a studio management, marketing, and invoicing service to one that embraces pedagogical tools as well. MTH's practice logging features can be accessed by both the student and teacher, as this tutorial video shows:

I particularly like the bar graph and how it shows consistency (or lack thereof). On the other hand, students' recording of practice on the service is limited to interaction between them and their teacher, and although it gives teachers a clear top-down view of how students are practicing, there isn't yet a way for students to see the practice habits of other students in the studio, nor to interact with them through MTH.

iScore 

A brand-new service by one of North America's most venerable musical institutions, iScore is the brainchild of a partnership between the Royal Conservatory, Queen's University, and Concordia University, growing out of the ePearl educational suite as an implementation tailored towards music students. iScore's practice-tracking process is a largely student-driven one, which utilizes the specific stages in learning a work to encourage students to both reflect on their practice and share it with others using an array of multimedia tools. Here's a short video about iScore:

iScore is a standalone pedagogical tool, without the other scheduling, marketing, and financial studio management tools that can be found in Music Teacher's Helper. From my initial look at the program a few weeks ago, it looks like teachers on iScore function more in an observational role - the onus is on the students to do both the practicing and spend the time learning the program so that they can engage with its numerous features. Because of its funding and development model, iScore is only available in Canada at present, and once the service gets going, it might provide ample reason for American music teachers to move north of the border.

Compound Time

Another new entry in this space is Michael Haddad's Compound Time (thanks for the heads-up, Erica), which is much closer to the spirit of an open social network such as Facebook. The Compound Time process emphasizes setting time goals and choosing repertoire, then setting a timer as you work on each work. Other users you have friended will also be able to see what you're practicing. Although Compound Time has by far the sparsest feature set of the three, it does have something dear to so many social networkers which the others do not - status updates, with the option to pull your Twitter feed into your profile. You can also use the service as a teacher, invite your students and then track their progress.

Depending on your agenda as a teacher, each of these services can fill a specific need in the potentially lonely life of the practicing student. The difficulty with any of them is that, in addition to motivating your students to practice, you have to make a case that they need to spend additional time logged in to a computer reflecting on their work and/or interacting with others. As the toolkits of these programs become more complex and integrated with the learning process, they require more time to both learn the program and put it into practice so that they can work their magic.

Music teachers: do you use any of these programs or others to track practicing? What rewards have you discovered? What challenges?

Music students: do you use an online service to track your practicing? Do you find it helpful for your process? Do the social aspects help to motivate you?

(Disclaimer: I'm on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory, one of the institutions behind the development of iScore.  I have a Music Teacher's Helper-enabled website, and have also been a member of the MTH blogging team for several years. I'm a member of MTH's affiliate program, and although you'll see affiliate links throughout this site, there are none in this article. I have a Compound Time teacher's account, but am not affiliated with the company in any way.)

More About Social Media, Trust Economies, and Classical Music

Grace Nikae has just written a long response to some of the questions I posed regarding Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's ebook manifesto on emerging trust economies on the web. Grace's article is required reading for anyone in classical music that is the least bit interested in the redoubtable field and its encounter with technology. I couldn't agree more with the heart of her argument, which is that the underlying motivation for engaging with people through technology should be a personal and artistic vision rather than a desire to get more engagements or fill seats:

The death of any artist is the day they stop growing - the search should continue to the last day of your life, until the last breath you take. And of course, I don’t mean simply locking yourself up in a practice room and looking only at scores for the rest of your life - although there are many people who believe this is what is meant by growing and improving. One has to grow consistently as a human being, in all facets - emotionally, mentally, spiritually - because this is what will always color the lens through which one can perceive and understand humanity, and thereby deepen one’s relationship and understanding to the nature of music and art itself.

New Music Strategies' Mission To Demystify Music And Technology

Via a post on Freelance Switch, I stumbled upon New Music Strategies, a blog that I think should be recommended reading for everyone in the musical field. Written by Andrew Dubber, NMS discusses the changing the landscape on which the music industry stands, or tries to stand. From Andrew's manifesto:

01. The music industry has not changed. It is changing.
One of the biggest mistakes music businesses make when trying to adapt to the online environment is to acknowledge the changes that have happened online and then set about adapting to accommodate those changes. In fact, those changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.

Among NMS's resources are a list of articles, a music industry newswire, and the free downloadable ebook 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.