I’ve been hearing rumblings about MuseScore for several weeks, but Joy’s review of it earlier this week prompted me to finally take a closer look. Like Joy, I was very disappointed to find that Finale decided to charge for the NotePad software that they previously offered free of charge. I had quite a few students who used it for their compositions. MuseScore looks like a great alternative (it’s free!). I’ve downloaded the most recent version and look forward to checking it out for myself.

Joseph Pisano, of the MusTech.Net, has compiled and posted a list of Must-Have Downloadable Freebies for music teachers. It’s a great list, separated into the following categories: Audio Editing, Ear Training, Early Music Instruction (Kids’ Stuff), Jazz Related Programs, Looping/Audio Mixing, Lyrics/Song Writing, Metronomes, Notation, MIDI Sequencing, Music Theory, Tuners, and Virtual Pianos. This is a fabulous compilation that every music teacher will want to bookmark for future reference!

Have you seen or used Pandora Radio? If not, you have got to check it out! My friend Olivia just mentioned it in an e-mail and I did a quick search to find out what she was talking about. The tagline is, “Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music.” When you first go to the site, you just enter the name of a favorite composition or composer and the radio station starts playing other similar pieces. This makes for great background music as I work on my computer and I’m especially loving the free part! It just may beat out iTunes for frequency of use on my computer from now on. I look forward to exploring it more in the days ahead.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve instituted a rather informal computer lab option in my studio this semester. Students can opt to sign up for an additional 15 minutes in the computer lab either before or after their lesson time. This is a simple, generic form I created for the students to sign up on at our kick-off event for the year. You can download and use it in your studio by clicking the image below.

Today has been mostly occupied with lots of brainstorming, jotting down notes and putting together all the details for next year’s studio incentive. You can check out some of the previous practice incentives I’ve developed in the Practice Incentives category. Anyway, in the process of gathering some links for my student assignment books, I clicked over to Wendy’s Piano Studio website and noticed that she has completed redesigned it and it looks incredible! It’s still full of all the same great resources, but now they are easier to navigate. My favorite page, though, is the Links page. The layout is very cool!

It looks like Wendy used Google Sites to build her website. I haven’t explored it at all, but anyone wanting to build their own website may want to check it out. If you’re looking into setting up your own website, here are a couple of other helpful posts:
Get Your Own Studio Website! – This is a little outdated, since I wrote it almost 3 years ago, but some of the information is still relevant and helpful.
Music Teacher’s Helper – Another Review – A great option for a full-blown record-keeping system and studio website. Or you can just set up a studio website for free!

I just gave a workshop last weekend to our local music teachers association on setting up your own website. Regardless of whether you are designing your own site from scratch or are using a pre-designed website from another provider (like Music Teacher’s Helper), you will definitely want to set up your own domain name so that people can easily access your studio website. Here are some step-by-step instructions on how to register your own domain name and then redirect it to any other website:

1. Go to 1and1.com (I selected 1and1.com because a friend of mine has used them with good success for domain registrations and their price is only $6.99/yr.)
2. Click on the Domains menu option.
3. Type in your domain name of choice.
4. Follow the on-line instructions to complete the registration process. Be sure to write down your password so that you can use it later!
5. Wait for approximately 24 hours to let the registration process take effect.
6. Go to 1and1.com
7. Click the Customer Login link at top of page and enter your domain name and password.
8. Click on the Manage Domains link.
9. Check the box beside your domain name and then click on Destination.
10. Select Forward Your Domain from the drop down menu.
11. Enter the URL for your studio website (i.e.teacherspianostudio.musicteachershelper.com)
12. Select the HTTP Redirect option.

After that you should be good to go! Try typing in your studio name to make sure that it redirects you to the appropriate website.

Okay, so I think I’ve been living under a rock to have not found this treasure trove of on-line music quizzes, puzzles and games before now! Created by Ms. K. Garrett, a Music Tech Teacher in Birmingham, AL, this site is an incredible resource for music teachers!

I haven’t officially started working on my computer lab plans yet, but this site is going at the top of the list of sites to use as I begin developing my curriculum plans. I just got done playing a few of the quizzes and they are very well done. Check out this favorite! Fun, huh? I also love that at the end of each quiz there is an option to print the score. This would make it so easy for my students to keep track of which games they’ve played and how they did. Plus, I could allow them to play as many times as they wanted and then bring their best score in to their lesson – extra motivation to keep playing until they really know the answers!

I noticed that Ms. Garrett uses this Question Writer software, so I’m checking into that some more as well. It would be wonderful to use this to develop customized quizzes for my students! I’m getting more and more excited about starting a computer lab in the fall. We’ll see who has more fun – my students or me!

Is everyone else equally crazy this time of year?! We just finished our Music Progressions evaluations this weekend – hooray! (So that’s my excuse for a dearth of posts this week.) I told my students I would even give them one week off of playing scales as a reward for all their hard work. They were thrilled! Now I’ve been thinking through some new things I want to try next year. I think I’m finally ready to take the plunge and offer an “official” computer lab in my studio. We do various technology-related things throughout the year, like recording CDs, participating in the Clavinova Festival (another one of my students just won a new Clavinova this month! That makes three from my studio now. If you have a Clavinova Festival in your area, I highly recommend it!), notating compositions in Finale, etc., but I’ve never offered a full-blown computer lab.

So, I’ve been exploring the Music Learning Community website more indepth and considering whether I should develop my computer lab around it to start with. I’ve heard wonderful reviews of it from lots of teachers and I know my students love the free games they play on it. The site offers “more than 450 web-based, fully interactive, multimedia learning games for music students — beginners through Level 4.” Pretty impressive!

Anyway, I’m putting this on my list of things to explore and figure out this summer. If any of you offer a computer lab or use Music Learning Community in your studio I’d love to know how it works for you and if you have any tips for someone just starting out.

For those of my readers who do not use an RSS feedreader, I’ve decided to offer an e-mail subscription option for Music Matters Blog. Just enter your e-mail address in the form in the right sidebar or in the form provided when you click on the above link and an e-mail will automatically be sent to you whenever I add a new post on Music Matters Blog. If you try it out, let me know what you think!

We just concluded our first week of piano camps here at the studio. With my older group, I decided to try a new project – writing and filming a documentary of the great hymn writer Isaac Watts. Each of the six students in this group are church musicians, so I thought it would be a fun way for them to learn some history and work together. We alternated between time spent working on this project, working on an ensemble piece, learning theory concepts and playing a few games. It was a ton of fun and I’m impressed with the quality of work they produced for a first effort.

Here’s a brief outline of how we put this project together:

1. Research – I provided books and printed pages from Internet resources and gave a section to each student, along with a hi-lighter. They were to read the information and hi-light any information that they thought was interesting and could be included in the script. Once they had finished reading their sections, I had everyone share the things they hi-lighted with everyone else.

2. Compile – We discussed the specific quotes that could be used in the script and began to brainstorm filming ideas.

3. Storyboard – I reviewed the example of this storyboard and printed out multiple copies of the free downloadable template. The students began drafting visual images of what they wanted to film for each scene and a general idea of what should be included in the narration.

4. Scripting – Each student took home one of the scenes and was assigned to write the script for that scene. The following day they read what they had written to the rest of the group. Several of the scenes overlapped so they opted to combine three of them into one scene, reducing the 8-scene outline to 6 scenes.

5. Film – One of the students was assigned to be the prop manager and collected the necessary props to set the scenes. The cameraman, actors and props manager started filming while the three other students worked on editing and typing the script.

6. Record – We tested each of the students reading the first couple lines of narration and then they voted on which one sounded best. The narrator moved into another room and began recording the narration while the other students worked on editing.

7. Edit – I gave the students a brief overview of how to use the editing software I purchased for the project and then let them take over and layout and format the scenes.

8. Finishing Touches – Once the recording and editing were complete I imported the narration into the software program and recorded the soundtrack. (Ideally I would have had one or more students do this part as well, but we ran out of time.) I did a little bit of tweaking to make sure the narration lined up with the filmed scenes and then rendered it and saved it as an MPG, uploaded it to Google Video and posted it here!

Here’s a list of the equipment we used for this project:
1. Canon Elura 100 MiniDV Camcorder - After doing quite a bit of research, reading reviews, getting advice from friends in the film industry and comparing prices, I decided to purchase this Canon camcorder. This had all the features I really wanted – MiniDV format, external mic jack, and SD memory card slot for expanded memory. I’ve been very pleased with it so far!

2. Adobe Premiere Elements – I ended up buying this bundled version that included Photoshop Elements because I’ve been wanting to get that software for a while, too, and it was a great deal to get them both in this bundled package.

3. Firewire Cable (4-pin – 4-pin) – This had to be purchased separately and was necessary in order to transfer video from the camera to the computer. Ebay yielded quite a few options for well below retail price.

4. Laptop Computer – I was a little worried that the software would be too cumbersome to run on my laptop, but it worked just fine.

5. Computer Mic – Used to record the narration.

6. Audacity Audio Recording Software – Open Source (i.e. Free) and very intuitive.

7. Clavinova CLP 220 – This is what I used to record the soundtrack.

8. 6 ft. Shielded Cable, 1/4″ plug to 1/8″ plug – I plugged this cable into the headphone jack of the Clavinova and into the mic jack of the laptop, using it as my line-in source for recording the soundtrack.