music educator

#72 - Secrets to Sustainable Careers, with Elisa Janson Jones

Elisa Janson Jones joins the show to talk about self-care, social media, and our favorite apps for being productive and healthy.

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Building a Second (Music Teacher) Brain, with Dr. Cory Meals

Dr. Cory Meals joins the show to talk about building a second brain, personal knowledge management apps, and how to keep it all together!

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➡️Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators - Apps to Help You Organize and Plan (NAfME Blog)

This blog post originally appeared on the blog for the National Association for Music Educators (nafme.org) on January 20, 2021.

Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators - Apps to Help You Organize and Plan:

What are your teaching goals for 2021? These apps will help you organize your plan and your time.

Every January, we reflect on our dreams for the coming year. For many, this might include some personal goals like spending more time reading or exercising. For others, it may take the form of professional and instructional goals.

There are innumerable tech tools that can help you with this process, whether it includes brainstorming your big ideas, reflecting on your progress, managing your time, or breaking big ideas into smaller and more actionable tasks.

Look at the Big Picture, Make a Plan

Whether you are the kind of person who likes to do a big brain dump at the beginning of a new year or someone who wants to reflect in a journal, check out these essentials.

MindNode

MindNodeThe user interface of MindNode.

MindNode is a mind mapping application for iOS and macOS. It allows you to create charts that start with a central theme, or "node," and then branch out into other nodes in a hierarchical fashion that is non-linear enough to support the flow of the human mind.

It's easy to think that drawing out a map like this is easier with paper and pen. MindNode makes the process easier than paper, whether your preferred input is by touch, keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. The benefit of making one of these maps on a computer is that you can quickly draw connections from one node to the next, and the software understands these connections. If I drag one of my nodes from one side of the map to the other, all of the other nodes will smartly adjust themselves, so the map looks balanced.

drag and dropDragging around nodes is buttery smooth.

Nodes can also contain various themes, styles, and graphics. You can tag nodes with a keyword and also edit in a linear outline instead of a map. Nodes can be turned into checkable to-dos, and you can export your entire map to a task app like Things or OmniFocus.

editing toolsMindNode's outline mode, clip art, and design editing tools.

If you are on Windows, Android, or are looking for alternative options to MindNode, check out these options:

DayOne

DayOne is an elegant and fully featured journaling app for iOS and macOS that can handle it all. It allows you to create journal entries based on text, photos, or voice memos. You categorize your journal entries by tagging them with keywords or putting them into separate journals. Entries sync across all of your devices.

rehearsal journalOne of the many things I use a journal for is for reflecting on each rehearsal and deciding where I want my focus to be in the following class. calendarOrganizing DayOne entries by image, calendar, event, and other media types.

Some great alternatives include:

I appreciate that DayOne has a calendar and media-centric way of letting you view your entries. If you are someone who does add photos, your content will feel interactive and quick to find.

"Manage" Your Tasks Instead of Drowning in Them

Learn a Task Management App

OmniFocus ForecastThe OmniFocus Forecast view shows me only the tasks that are relevant to a selected day.

You may be familiar with the to-do app on your phone. Some of the most notable are Reminders and Google Keep.

These apps are a great start, but you might find that the alternatives below to be more powerful and flexible. Teachers have our hands full. We need tools that allow us to capture our thoughts the moment we have them, and I am not talking about post-it notes all over your laptop. The following apps all have options for adding tasks to your to-do app in one (or less) taps and feature robust organizing tools like projects, tags, saved search.

OmniFocus InboxThe OmniFocus Inbox.

OmniFocus is my digital brain. On my laptop, I hold the control key plus the spacebar to add a task, even if the app isn't running in the foreground, to quickly enter a thought as it comes to me. On my phone, I can use my voice assistant or the widget on my home screen to quickly capture ideas. My favorite feature is maildrop. OmniFocus provides me with a unique email address I can forward emails towards that will send them to my OmniFocus inbox, with the subject line as the task and the message's body as an attached note. This helps me get those actionable emails that don't require a response out from my mail app and into a to-do list where I can snooze them for when they are relevant. Sanity achieved!

organizing tasksOrganizing Tasks by Project.

Once they are in the database, they go into an inbox to organize them with projects, tags, start dates, and due dates. Start and due dates are crucial for me in a task app. I use the Forecast view in OmniFocus to see what tasks I want to be working on for a given day and which ones are due. I provide due dates only to tasks that I cannot survive the day without doing. This means that I am less often overwhelmed when all of the tasks turn red and overdue items clutter my view of what is important. OmniFocus also supports project templates.

I have templates for concerts, field trips, band adjudication, teaching new repertoire, running my district's Middle School Honor Band, and more. When I create a project from one of these templates, I can even set up the start and due dates relative to an event.

For example, when I tell OmniFocus the date of a winter concert, the task "pack tuba into the car" doesn't show up on my radar until a few hours before I leave for the venue. The task "write concert program" shows up numerous days early.

The fact that I can view things by project, due date, a tag, or a custom perspective means that once I organize them, I can view them from different angles where I am focused on only what is relevant at a given time, place, mental state, or context.

If you are looking for a little more power than the standard Reminder app on your phone, and want something more straightforward and elegant, try Things by Cultured Code. Both apps are based heavily on the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen, which has helped to shape how I manage the projects in my life.

OmniFocus is available for iOS, macOS, and on the web. Most of the apps I listed above have similar features.

If you are just starting out with task management, I recommend Todoist. It has a free option, is available on all platforms, including the web, and has most of the features you could expect from a to-do app (no start dates, though). Todoist also features collaboration! This means you can share a project with other users on your music team or staff and share tasks with one another for ultimate transparency and teamwork.

Project Collaboration and digital organizationTodoist Project Collaboration.

If you want to learn more about how I manage my time as a music teacher using to-do apps and complementary software, check out this video.

Whatever task app you settle on, make sure it has the features you need. Dr. Frank Buck (productivity consultant, retired band director, and administrator) refers to his top features like the Essential 7:

  1. "Due date" field and ability to sort by due date
  2. Repeating tasks
  3. Note section for each task to house supporting information
  4. Search feature
  5. Communicates with your email
  6. Syncs across all devices
  7. Voice input

*I actually do use a paper journal called The Theme System journal, primarily because I believe that New Year's resolutions are usually too concrete or too vague as to be fulfilled.

Presentations I Am Giving At TMEA 2021 Next Week

Are you going to be at the Texas Music Educators Association conference next week? If so, I hope to see you there! I am presenting a session and appearing on a panel.

Develop Performance Skills Remotely with Cloud Software - Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 3 pm

Session description: If you are teaching in person, remotely, or hybrid, learn about great software you can use to reinforce the growth of perfor- mance skills among your students! Explore how students can use Noteflight Learn, Soundtrap, Flipgrid, and Google Docs to demonstrate technical skills, compose music, respond to music, multitrack-record themselves playing ensemble literature, col- laborate in chamber ensembles synchronously, and more.

Music Technology Tips You Can Use Today - Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 7 pm

My book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers is part of the Prestissimo Series by Oxford University Press. Richard McCready, series editor, will be hosting a session featuring all of the authors in the series and the editors at OUP responsible for making it happen.

Each author will talk for a few minutes about their book and give one tip that a teacher could take immediately into the classroom the following day. I will be talking about organizing digital score libraries and managing your email inbox.

Session description: The Prestissimo “Essential Music Technology” series, published by Oxford University Press, is a collection of handy books containing tips and advice on how to incorporate technology into your music teaching situation easily. In this session, authors who have written books in the series will share their best tips from the books with you. This round-table style discussion will be led by series editor Richard McCready (TIME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year 2013). There will also be a prize drawing at the session for free copies of some of the Prestissimo series books.

List of Panelists: Robby Burns is a band director and general music teacher at Ellicott Mills Middle School in Maryland, where he is also an active performing percussionist and private instructor. He is the author of “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and hosts the blog and podcast Music Ed Tech Talk.

Michelle Chen is Senior Editor of Music Education and Performance at Oxford University Press. She joined OUP in 2020 and previously held positions at Palgrave Macmillan and Bloomsbury Publishing.

Dr. Rick Dammers is the Dean of the College of Performing Arts and Professor of Music Education at Rowan University. He is the co-author of the book “Practical Music Education Technology”, is the author of the technology chapter in the “Oxford Handbook of Preservice Music Teacher Education in the United States” and is the recipient of the 2010 TI:ME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year Award.

Catherine Dwinal is the educational technology specialist working for QuaverEd and TI:ME’s 2014 Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year. Catherine is the author of “Interactive Visual Ideas for Musical Classroom Activities” and has the pleasure of working with thousands of educators from all over the country helping them to integrate technology into the classroom.

Norm Hirschy is Executive Editor for Books on Music at Oxford University Press. Prior to joining OUP in 2004, he studied at The College of Wooster and at The Ohio State University.

Ronald E. Kearns is a retired instrumental music teacher. He is the author of “Recording Tips for Music Educators”, as well as Quick Reference for Band Directors” and “Quick Reference for Band Directors Who Teach Orchestra” (NAfME/RLE Publishing).

Marjorie LoPresti is the US Digital Content Manager for MusicFirst, Adjunct Professor of Music Education Technology at Rutgers University, and co-author of “Practical Music Education Technology”. She was the recipient of the 2016 TI:ME Mike Kovins Teacher of the Year Award.

Peter Perry is the author of “Technology Tips for Ensemble Teachers.” He received the Brent Cannon Music Education Alumni Achievement Award from Kappa Kappa Psi, recognizing outstanding contributions to secondary music education; the Presidential Scholar Teacher Award; and a Japan Fulbright fellowship. He is in his 25th year as Instrumental Music Director at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland and is on the music education faculty of the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.