Thomas J. West Music

This year, I purchased Noteflight Classroom for my school as part of my professional development goal to create a fully blended learning music curriculum this year. (By the way, Noteflight Classroom just slashed their price in half until October 31, 2011 - take advantage now!)

Noteflight is web-based music composition software with social media sharing features. Users can create full music scores that play in browser and can be shared via Noteflight itself, by url, or embedded on web pages. The paid version of Noteflight, known as Noteflight Crescendo, allows users to create up to 1000 scores.

Noteflight Classroom takes it all a step further, giving teachers a dedicated website and the ability to enroll up to 250 instructor and student accounts with full-featured Crescendo features.

Customized Sharing Controls For Site And Score

My school's site is http://cpfa-music.sites.noteflight.com and you will see when you visit that it is curently set so that it does not display to the general public. Site administrators can click a simple checkbox which will "allow anonymous viewing of shared scores" from the site. Students can log in and create scores that can be kept private, shared and commented on within your site only, and even open a score to collaboration among any site member. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for collaboration and peer evaluation.

Super Easy Student Enrollment

I've used quite a few different pieces of software and web-based services for education, and I must say that Noteflight Classroom's interface to enter student information is one of the most effortless in terms of functionality.

Screenshot of student/instructor enrollment interface

Create a username and generic password to copy and paste in each student's profile, and on their first login, they can change the password to keep their work safe from other students.

Compose, Collaborate, And Create Assignments

Noteflight Classroom allows instructors to make Activity Templates which identifies the score with a different icon when students browse the score on the site. The instructor must set the template's sharing to allow all site users to view, comment, and modify the score. Worried about the students changing the original assignment and cheating? Not to worry - just click on the "Versions" tab and get a timestamped list of revisions to the score. Click on a revision and Noteflight shows you what that version looks like. Click "revert", and the score is saved as the cureent version you are viewing and is listed as a new item on the Version list under your profile name.

Easily see student revisions of a score in the Versions tab

I am really excited about the prospects that Noteflight Classroom will provide for my program this year and look forward to reporting more on it as the year goes on.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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