5 iPad Apps that help students learn how to read music

As I sat and read my boys' report cards this week, I noticed how many opportunities they are provided on a weekly basis to learn something I never did...music.  There schedules involve weekly courses in keyboarding, music, violin (for one of them).  I am extremely happy they are exposed to this at an early age.  I was never musically talented nor was I exposed to it early in my education.  I would say reading music is all Greek to me, but I am Greek so that wouldn't make sense ;-). However, I never learned to read music but wish I had.  This brings me to the main point of this blog post. Technology today can offer some great opportunities in music education.  I recently read about 5 iPad apps that help students learn to read music.    The apps provide exercises, challenging quizzes, tutorials and several other materials for music learners.

1. Name that note: This is a note spelling quiz to help learn note names on a staff (there are 3 different levels)
2. ClefTutor Free:  Includes a number of helpful tutorials teaching music fundamentals from musical alphabet to the staff and more.  It also features challenging quizzes.  
3. Music Note Sight Reading Trainer: This app is designed to mimic the look and style of real sheet music.  An important feature of this app is to read from left to right while having multiple notes on the staff at the same time as it would be with real music.
4. Tenuto: A collection of 15 customizable exercises designed to enhance musicality (from recognizing chords on a keyboard to indentifying intervals by ear.  It also includes five musical calculators for accidentals, intervals, chords, analysis symbols, and twelve-tone matrices
5. Music Tutor Free: Improves sight-reading skills by practicing between treble clef, bass cleff or both for a duration of 1, 5, or 10 min. 

Theses apps can be put on our iPad carts to be used in whole class settings, load it on your teacher iPad for station work, or pass them along to parents of your students for additional practice at home.

Pindex-"Pinterest for Education"

Pindex is a pinboard (similar to Pinterest) for education.  It allows students and teachers to create and curate educational videos and infographics.   Pindex has a feature where you can award digital badges for watching videos and completing short quizzes on a particular board.  Badges are awarded to viewers after they check off each post on the board.  If you post a quiz to a board, viewers must score 100% to progress and earn the award (the quiz can be taken as many times as they like).  What a great way to create and share playlists of educational videos.  In addition,  earning digital badges provides a great way to monitor student progress. 

This application is currently in beta and is only available through an invitation. You can request an invitation through their site and should receive confirmation within a few hours.    Learn more about Pindex by clicking here

2 Google Docs updates released last week that might be useful for your classroom

Google is constantly updating browsers, apps, etc and the updates are instantaneous (no need to manually force the update).  Without knowing the updates are coming, the new features can often times go unnoticed.  However, these updates could have potential benefits for you or your students. Here are 2 recent updates that might be useful in your classroom:

• Document Outlining Tool:  If you are working in a Google Doc, your browser now has a document outlining tool.  The outline tool will recognize headers within your document and automatically create a table of contents for easy navigation within longer Google Docs.  To access the outline tool, select "Document outline" from the "Tools" drop-down menu within your doc.  NOTE:  The heading is not recognized by the tool if there isn't anything written underneath the heading.  See video cast below for how this works

• EPUB Publication:  Creating an EPUB file allows you to create ebooks which could be shared to eReaders (iPads, Kindles, etc).  If you or your students are looking to create ebooks, using the EPUB feature in Google Docs could be a good option.  To create an EPUB file, select "download as" from the "File" drop down menu in your Google Document then choose "EPUB".  Once you have the file in EPUB format, the challenge is getting it to your eReader.  To learn how to do this select the following links (they are links to google searches):

• How to add EPUBS on your Kindle
• How to add EPUBS on your iPad

Turn your phone or tablet into an optical grading machine to grade assessments in a flash (similar to Scantron)

Do you currently use Scantron sheets in you classroom? Are you currently looking for a system where you can administer multiple choice assessments more effectively than you do now?

If you answered yes to either of these, you may want to take a look at ZipGrade.  ZipGrade is an iOS or Android app that turns your phone or tablet into an optical grading machine.   The app scans answer sheets, grades them automatically, and organizes the results for later review.  The answer sheets are available in multiple sizes (up to 50 questions) and are free to download from the app or website.

Download the app for free which allows 100 free scans.   The free scans provide you a test run to see how you can best use ZipGrade in your classroom.   After the 100 free scans, the full version can be purchased for $6.99/year. Use it in your classroom to provide instant feedback to students by grading

• exit tickets
• Warm-up activities
• Summative/Formative Assessments

In addition, the app allows you to easily self reflect the topics that need to be retaught since you have the ability to do an item analysis which provides immediate feedback and statistics on class comprehension.

To learn more about ZipGrade visit their website or check them out in the app store:

https://www.zipgrade.com/
iTunes Store
Google Play

Evernote Web Clipper...a remarkable button that saves anything to Evernote (Evernote Tip and Trick)

Are you an avid Evernote user?  Well according to Evernote themselves if you are not using Evernote Web Clipper you aren't using Evernote.  So what is Evernote Web Clipper?  It is a tool used to clip articles, text, images, PDF files and more all from your browser.   By adding the Evernote Extension to your web browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc), you will have the ability to clip web based content to Evernote.  

Once the extension is added, an icon will appear in the browser toolbar.  Simply click the icon when you want to clip something to Evernote (capture full-page articles, a simplified article (gets rid of ads),  the full web page, images, selected text, important emails, or even a screenshot).  If the web page is a PDF file being viewed, it will clip that.  Links in the page are kept live too.   Once the clipping is in Evernote, you can annotate the clipping and/or add comments to the clipped selection

What a great way for saving web pages, and articles for research, curating (great for web pages that disappear after a while), future use, bookmarking, etc.  Also, use it to gather additional resources to share with your students who may need or want them.   Better yet, teach students to use it.  It will become a valuable resource for them now and in the future.

Save everything in one place....Evernote... and keep it forever.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO USE EVERNOTE WEB CLIPPER