Music teachers - Feedback topic

[Quentin]

This topic is for all users of EarMaster School. You may discuss your experience of the program in teaching situation here.

For example, you may tell us what challenges you had to face in order to integrate EarMaster to your teaching plan, or come with suggestions on how to optimize the educational features of the program.

Thanks for your participation!

Best regards,
Quentin.

[Bogonip]

We must be able to build a Tutor for students that moves them through MULTIPLE areas.... not just one functionality of earmaster.

intervals -> singing -> chords -> progressions -> dictation -> chords -> superfast intervals -> harder progressions -> more chords -> harder singing -> etc

[Patricio]

Hi,

This is a posibility that we have been considering for the new version of EarMaster. We thank you for the feedback, the teachers opinons are really important for us, they let us to develope EarMaster even more.

Right now a posibility is to make diferents tutors for each area and assign to the students this tutors in the order you want. You can always define how hard each tutor will start from, and a lots of other cofigurations.

Best regards,

[Steve]

Hello everyone. My name is Steve and I would like to share some of my experience with you. Hopefully it will help some other musicians who feel overwhelmed.

I have been playing guitar and studying music for 27 years now. There are days where I feel like I found the holy grail and times when I feel like I haven't progressed at all. Music is a lifelong study with no end to what can be learned.

Here are some suggestions to help you get over the hump so to speak.

1) Spend most of your time working on your problem areas.

This is very easy to overlook. Most musicians practice what they do best and put the problem areas on the back burner. Following the path of least resistance is natural, so be patient and discipline yourself.

This tip is one of the best tips that I can think of. If is VERY difficult to do, but it is well worth the sacrafice.

2) Go to youtube and search for your favorite artist and learn from them.

Here is another biggie. For years I was stuck in the 80's shred hair band thing because that was what I grew up hearing. This was a BIG problem for me because I was only able to play in that style.

Here is what I did that totally changed me as a musician.

Learn to play as many different styles as you can. Follow this link http://www.goldstandardsonglist.com

This site has an indexed database of information on 5,000 of the greatest songs in popular music, composed over a 100-year period, in 14 genres ranging from ragtime to rap.

I found songs and genres that I have never played before from the website and searched for the song on youtube. This is AWESOME because you also get to see the performance being played by the original artist.

I will continue with this thread if there are enough interested people. I would also be willing to start up a topic thread where users can share their experience with the standardsonglist. This could be a topic all of it's own.

Thank you

Steve

[CallMeZoot]

I am just beginning to implement EarMaster School in my music theory class. A few suggestions:

(If any of these things are already possible, please let me know how)

1.) I wish STUDENT "allow exercise setup" could be decided on a per-exercise basis, instead of an all-or-nothing basis. I would like students to create their own exercises in order to practice their weaknesses. However, if I "allow exercise setup," then they can also edit the exercises I send to them, which makes cheating easy. (They can change all intervals to "Unison" and achieve a score of 100% easily -- and I won't know the difference by looking at my Teacher "Results" page). Ideally I would like to see two checkboxes in USER\ACCESS:
-"Allow Exercise Setup for Private/Custom Exercises"
-"Allow Exercise Setup for Teacher-Created Exercises"
The teacher result page should specify "custom exercise"or "teacher exercise" so we can distinguish how students are doing on our exercises vs. the ones they create for themselves.

2.)I would like to see a "Quiz" or "Test" Mode -- which allows a specified number of questions (like Tutor Mode), but with "Exercise Setup Control" options (answer input, play/time limits, etc. -- currently only available in Exercise Mode). Sometimes I would like my students to have time limits, or to use ONLY staff input or ONLY multiple-choice input. This is possible in Exercise mode, but not in Tutor mode -- if I want to have a specified number of questions, I cannot use these Exercise Control options.

3.)When I create an exercise for my students, I would like the option to disable/grey out unused "Exercise Areas" (like in Tutor mode). This way I know my students are working on the correct area of my exercise. (Right now when they open up one of my exercises, it sometimes goes to the wrong "Area" and they begin working on a default exercise in that area instead of the customized area I created).

4.)Results Page - I would like an option to see the results of each attempt individually, not just the total of all attempts.

5.)Delete Results - I would like to delete SPECIFIC results, not just "all results before [date]." If a student gets a low score because of a technical error, or gets a high score by cheating, I would like to delete the results from that session without deleting every previous session.

6.)"Save Exercise Setup As..." is often greyed out. Why? Sometimes I would like to make several variations on an exercise (one exercise ascending, one descending, one harmonic). I would like to save these as separate files, but sometimes I can only overwrite the original because "Save as..." is not available. Is there any way around this? Also, why is there no "Create New Exercise" option?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Steve]

Sorry, I put this post in the wrong discussion... How can I delete my previous post (Posted: Oct 07, 2008 5:05 am)? There is no delete this post checkbox.

Thanks

Steve

[Quentin]

Hello Zoot,
I believe most of the options you are mentioning, like the creation of tests with time liimits, forcing the use of a particular answering method or disbaling undesired exercise areas can all be set up with the tutor creation tool.

In EarMaster School, click on the "Exercise Settings" menu, and choose "Tutor Editor". Then create a brand new tutor (set of lessons): You can choose the exercise areas to use, the precise elements to include in the lessons, the number of questions, difficulty, answering method, etc.
Once it is saved, you can assign the new set of lesson (tutor) to the students you want, and the results will show specific results for the newly created tutor.

Don't hesitate to write again if you need precisions

[tchilds]

Not sure if this is the best place to post, but...

Our school is using EarMaster Cloud this year. We're setting up different courses for each of the levels of theory/ET we do. When using the module setup (mix of various exercises), the "If failed, go to" option only allows moving to another lesson in the module. This doesn't help if they have an issue with a rhythm exercise and the other exercises all deal with intervals or melody.

I'd love to have an option to point them back to a specific assignment or exercise even if it's in another module. Just a suggestion as you continue development. Thanks!

[Quentin]

This is a very good idea indeed. I have forwarded it to the development team.

[tchilds]

We're using the Cloud version at our school. It would be very convenient as a teacher to be able to see statistics sorted by module. The date settings make the sorting process easier, but if you do assignments by module it would be nice to isolate them.

[Quentin]

Very good idea, thank you. I have notified the developers about your suggestion.