DREAM 2478 …

DREAM2478 … that’s the number of resources waiting for you on DREAM at this very moment — and we’re hoping for close to 3,000 when we officially launch on September 1. Stay tuned… for updates as the countdown continues!

Posted in DREAM

33 days to go… until we launch DREAM

DREAMWe’re getting very close to being ready to release DREAM to the public! DREAM stands for Digital Resource Exchange About Music, and it will be available in both English and French when we launch on September 1. For the past few days, music teachers and RCM examiners have gathered at Wintergreen to add more resources to the site, and for the past several months, some of our undergraduate music students have been doing the same. We’re very excited about the tool—it’s going to be fantastic! Useful, too. You can click here for a sneak preview… there might be a few glitches yet, but it will give you an idea of what is to come!

DREAMThanks, also, to the 50 teachers from across Canada who have been helping us beta-test DREAM. And of course, to the programmers and designers at the RCM, Concordia, and Queen’s.

Posted in DREAM

Technology Summit at the RCM

summitThis past weekend (July 12-13), the RCM hosted the 5th Summer Summit for independent music teachers. This year’s theme was “Inspired Teaching with Technology” — and there was a lot of inspired teaching during the entire weekend!

Rena Upitis (left) with iSCORE Teaching Award winner Marlene Sampaio

Rena Upitis (left) with iSCORE Teaching Award winner Marlene Sampaio

On Saturday, the iSCORE Teaching Award was presented to Marlene Sampaio, a teacher who has been working with iSCORE since it was first launched. The 2014-2015 iSCORE Fellowship was also presented, to Nathalie de Grâce, a CEGEP de Sherbrooke faculty member, who will be using iSCORE for ear training and small ensemble rehearsals in the upcoming year. Congratulations to both.

During the course of the summit, various members of The Suite team provided workshops and took part in panel discussions. Jodie Compeau and Anne Wade presented iSCORE as a between-lesson teaching tool, and Laura Johnson and Heidi Saario gave conference attendees a sneak peak of DREAM. Rena Upitis took part in the closing plenary. All in all, a busy and exciting weekend!

Posted in Conferences, DREAM, Events, iSCORE, Suite of tools

iPad Mini winners

iPad mini with the home page of our soon to be released DREAM software

iPad mini with the home page of our soon to be released DREAM software

We received thousands upon thousands of completed questionnaires from teachers, students, and parents of students who take music lessons. It has been thrilling making our way through the data—many people have touched us with their stories about why music means so much to their lives. We expect to be releasing preliminary results this fall, and we’ll post about them regularly.

Meanwhile, though, we’re happy to announce the winners of the three iPad Mini packages. Of the thousands of people who completed the survey and whose names were entered in to the draw. three were selected. Moira Buck, the teacher who won a package, teaches in Alberta. The winning parent, September, lives in Ontario. And the lucky student—Alison Saunders—is from British Columbia. These three provinces were well represented in our survey, and we’re very pleased that there were students, parents, and teachers who responded from every single province and territory in Canada!

Posted in Awards, DREAM, Events, Suite of tools

Electroacoustic workshop for pianists and composers

electroacousticMatt Rogalsky, sound artist and musicologist, who since 1985 has presented work regularly in performances and gallery exhibitions across North America and Europe, conducted a workshop for members of the project team on Monday afternoon. In fact, he had just returned from Porto, Portugal, where he led a project called David Tudor’s Rainforest. This installation project, consisting of 24 suspended sculptural objects, engaged audiences in live impromptu performances, in keeping with Tudor’s dedication to the art of live performances of electronic music.

electroacousticMatt’s academic background includes studies in electroacoustic composition with Martin Bartlett and Barry Truax at Simon Fraser University, and an M.A. from Wesleyan University where he studied composition and sound installation with Ron Kuivila and Alvin Lucier, and researched the musical culture of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. His Ph.D. from City University London (with Simon Emmerson) was a history of the Rainforest series of works by David Tudor, and an investigation of the social networks which made them possible.

Screen Shot 2014-06-10 at 9.56.36 AMOur work with Matt wasn’t exactly up to Tudor’s standards, but in Tudor’s spirit, two pianists were Skyped in from Toronto to our Kingston office, where we used a combination of software, recording equipment, and disklaviers to explore ways of using these technologies to aid teaching (attack for chords, pedalling) and to create new works.

Posted in Disklavier projects

We’ve changed our name to The Suite

the suiteNews for followers of iSCORE! We’re changing our website from iscorenews.com to musictoolsuite.ca, in keeping with our expanded vision of providing a broad range of digital tools, for computers and for mobile devices, that will meet the needs of music teachers, parents, and students.

The music world has changed considerably since we began developing iSCORE in 2010. Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in music studios — many students arrive at their lessons with smartphones in their pockets, and teachers often prop a tablet up on the music stand during the lesson to share a recording of a piece of repertoire or to use a digital metronome. The vast majority of music teachers have Internet in their studios, and many are using apps and games to encourage their students to practice or to help them develop sight reading skills. Consequently, we’re also in the process of developing tools that are responsive to changing needs — many of which we learned about from our national survey that was distributed to teachers, parents, and students.

We will continue to support iSCORE through our website, and through the pre-recorded webinars that appear on our YouTube channel (click the icon on the left sidebar). The RCM continues to offer technical support as well. Teachers have been doing some exciting things with iSCORE this past year, and we’ll continue to post their success stories on this site.

Soon, the first of our new tools will be available to teachers. In August 2014, we will launch DREAM — which stands for Digital Resource Exchange About Music. Read more about it on our website, and watch for news on Facebook and Twitter (yes, they’re also called Music Tool Suite!).

Posted in DREAM, iSCORE, Suite of tools

Contact North: Our Suite of Digital Tools

contact northContact North is Ontario’s distance education and training network. Recently, Rena Upitis had an opportunity to speak with Judith Tobin from Contact North, who had made contact with the iSCORE project to learn more about iSCORE and the other tools that we have started developing. The article is posted here. In addition to describing iSCORE, Dr. Upitis talked about DREAM, the Digital Resource Exchange About Music, scheduled for release later in 2014. As its name suggests, DREAM will provide a place where music teachers can learn about various digital resources (websites, recordings, games, apps), as well as review the resources listed and add resources of their own. Dr. Upitis also described the Annotator App, which will be an iOS app that mimics the annotation tool in iSCORE, allowing teachers, parents, and students to make comments on updated video or audio recordings. Cadenza is a leaner version of iSCORE, currently under development. Both the Annotator App and Cadenza are being developed for 2015.

Posted in Media, Suite of tools

On the learning curve … creating community

Screen Shot 2014-03-28 at 5.19.39 PM  “She likes coming to lessons, but I just don’t know how to get her to practice at home.” Why is this type of utterance such a common lament for parents and teachers? My own question isn’t how can we make students practise. It’s more a question of how we can help students want to spend time playing their instrument. Many kids begin their relationships with music in something of an arranged marriage – paired with an instrument often chosen by matchmaker parents and guided by teachers. They sometimes fall in love with their partner instrument, sometimes not. Other students fall in love with an image of themselves and music making, and when that image meshes with reality – wonderful. When it doesn’t, then the relationship can fail, especially if other “loves” like sports or dance and social groups come crowding in. Who hasn’t seen that image of the solitary geeky kid, indoors, sawing away at his violin or piano or whatever instrument, while the cool kids are outside being cool… together. So I suppose my question really is, how can we make music a less isolating experience for students?

Screen Shot 2014-03-28 at 5.20.06 PMProblem 1 – feeling alone in the practice room. We encourage our piano parents to support and encourage their young musicians, but there came a time in my own early teen years when I really didn’t want my parents to even listen to me play, let alone give feedback. I would have happily given away my LP’s and heart-throb posters for some time with other musicians who were wrestling with the same sorts of joys and frustrations I was. Nobody I knew played an instrument, let alone the “long-haired” music my teacher had me on a steady diet of. I enjoyed learning it, but it certainly didn’t help me fit in with any of the other kids! These days, most teachers let their students play pop music regularly, but even so, nobody but another music student will likely understand the mildly o.c.d. commitment that helps most students progress beyond a basic level, so talking about pop-listening playlists won’t be quite the same as talking with someone who shares your pain (and even better, has suggestions!) when you moan about those stupid BIG chords you can’t quite reach in that song you REALLY want to play for the talent show, or that crazy-making sonata passage you just can’t get!

Suggestion – use social media like a Facebook studio page or iSCORE to open an exchange between students within the studio and between iSCORE-linked studios. Do any of the students already know each other from school? We teachers can do some nudging to encourage students to exchange messages and recordings – small-scale “virtual ensemble” recordings anyone? It might easily work, but my guess is that for some, it might not have enough of the “wow” factor to shake them into action. Myself, I’m going to hand pick some of my students to participate in an experimental studio linkup with one or two studios in New Zealand and Australia (including Tasmania!) – it’ll certainly take some time and effort, but the results could be ground breaking. I’ll keep you posted.

Problem 2 – It’s lesson day again already? I forgot to practise! For whatever reason, students are not making regular “dates” with their musical instruments between lessons. How can we make our encouraging teacherly presence felt mid-week? Through iSCORE, we can message with students online, via students’ home pages and artifacts. A practise assignment could be, “iSCORE me a video of ….” Perhaps a successful 3-times-nicely recording uploaded for you to see and comment on, or a question you can answer via uploaded demonstration. “See how I switched fingers on that note? That’s how you can turn 5 fingers into 6!” Frustration and confusion are real motivation killers, and it makes for a much more productive week if we can eliminate them soon after the lesson has taken place. Speaking of eliminating frustrations, I hear the wunderkinder of the iSCORE technical team have fixed the log-in issue that was such a huge frustration for many.  Yay!

Good ideas aside, I gnash my idealist’s teeth over the majority of my students who I’m convinced would benefit from it but still aren’t using iSCORE (or even emailing me their “I practiced” messages or accomplishment videos, grr!). I keep trying, though, encouraged by those who’ve made the time and reaped the benefits of between-lesson interaction with me and other students. As with most practice-incentive schemes, there are the perennial questions, “Does any of it help the hard-core non-practicers? Will the practicers always practise anyway?” We can but try!

 

Posted in Julia Fountain's Teacher Blog

iSCORE on YouTube!

Over the past year, a number of students and teachers have created videos to showcase iSCORE work and to explain how various aspects of the tool function. These videos are now all available on our iSCORE YouTube channel. There are four playlists:

  • What is iSCORE?
  • Music Students Using iSCORE
  • Testimonials About iSCORE
  • Learning to Use iSCORE

You can check out the Playlists here: https://www.youtube.com/user/iSCOREMusicPortfolio/playlists

Or you can just press the YouTube icon on the homepage.

Posted in iSCORE iDEAS, iSCORE training, Video tutorials

Surveys!

The iSCORE research team sent out electronic links to surveys for teachers, parents, and students this past weekend, and we’ve had an amazing response rate so far… many thanks to all of the teachers, parents, and students who have already filled it out. We look forward to hearing from as many people as possible, across the country. We already have participants from every territory and province — very exciting!

While we’re pleased to have the statistical data, the comments that people have made in the open-ended sections of the surveys are particularly heart-warming and rich. Here’s just one quote from a parent:

I give much of the credit of [my daughter’s] love of music to her violin teacher, himself a classically trained teacher, who has turned most of his attention to teaching teens fiddle music and forming a high level performance group. He found that many teens quit (classical) music in their early teens. By forming a semi-professional group where teens could perform, socialize and have fun with their music, many of them continued with their music and some even go on to pursue careers in music after they graduate from high school.

We will continue to collect survey responses until April 15. After we analyze the surveys over the summer months, the results will be posted on the website. If you are one of the thousands of people who filled out a survey, we will let you know when the results are available.

Posted in Research