Five useful tools to support music education

Here are five of my favourite apps/online tools that can be used to create, share, or listen to music. In the list below, click on the name of the tool to visit the web site and find out more about what it can do and how to download it.

Explain Everything (iOS & Android)

This versatile, open-ended app has no limit to the way it can be used in educational settings. It has all of the features of a slideshow app, a screencasting app, and a whiteboard app. For music, it could be used to record sounds of instruments and/or voice, ear train, annotate performances, create graphic scores, etc.

Example use: http://www.constructivisttoolkit.com/home/explain-everything-ear-training

GarageBand (iOS)

This Apple app succeeds at making the creation of music accessible to people who may have little musical training, or even none at all. The app can be used in different modes and can support various levels of competence in musical composition. In the video below, the actual GarageBand tutorial starts at about the 4:00 mark.

Noteflight (online tool)

This free, online tool for writing standard musical notation is one of the easiest to use. Users can create scrores and have the ability to produce publication quality scores. Or, students can have fun freely exploring their music ideas; it’s easy to experiment with notes, rests, clefs, signatures, mordents, tempos, and so on. The tool has a built in playback mode so that users can listen to how their composition sounds.

MadPad (iOS)

This app lets you “remix your life.” That is, you can make recordings of various sounds you make or hear to create a custom percussive pad. You can create rhythms and beats from the sounds of your life. Users can also record specific performances and export the video to the camera roll.

NAXOS Music Library (online resource)

If you are a PDSB student or teacher, you can access this resource at school quite easily by clicking on this link: http://peel.naxosmusiclibrary.com/ If you are at home, you can access this resource for free by using this link: http://naxosmusiclibrary.com/ and then entering the correct username and password. The login information is available at your school. This resource contains over 1.7 million music tracks in every musical genre!

#peel21st Blog Hop

This post was part of a blog hop organized for #peel21st in December, 2015. Please check out the other blogs in this hop by clicking on one of the links below: