hi everyone and welcome back to my channel if you're new here my name is Elizabeth and I run the blog life from the viola section.com where I share my favorite practice tips general advice and Tech for musicians I'm also a private music teacher that's what I do most of the time I teach Viola violent and piano lessons through the week and today I want to share some of my favorite websites and apps and teaching resources for music teachers so that if you don't use any of these things hopefully you can find something new to help you out improve your teaching and just automate and make things a little bit easier for yourself so if we're going to talk through some invoicing websites my bank account a little bit places that I find teaching resources and where I make my Graphics all those kinds of things and a couple apps that I use within my lessons basically every day of the week so let's dive into the first one which is honeybook this is my honeybook home page I'm sorry A lot of it is blurred out but there's a lot of student information on here and I want to keep all of that private so right here on the home page it's very kind to you but it shows you all of your different projects so projects are what I make so I make my projects as like blanks piano lessons or blanks violin lessons things like that then payments you can see what's overdue what's been paid recently any payments that are coming up to beat you um you can set some tasks here I've never used that but it is could be helpful then you have your calendar I have mine set to sync with my Google Calendar so that everything is all integrated and then you have reports which can show you profit and loss just Profit just your expenses and also where you've made your money from like where your students have been coming from or where your leads have been coming from so here is an overview of some of the helpful tools that they have on here recently I've been using the time tracker function because I'm working on a freelance project where I'm doing a bit of editing and reworking so instead of charging by the word I'm charging per hour so I'm keeping track of my time that way um there so there are a lot of different powerful things that you can use here the main thing that I do here in honeybook is create invoices for my students and I invoice monthly so um usually I will go through the list of projects and just go one by one through my students but in an effort to not blur so much stuff out we'll just do it this way new invoice and then you can have your own templates so what I've been doing is I've created four week invoices and then I also need to still create three week invoices so I selected A student got all that so my invoice looks like this sorry again for the blur so the first page of the invoice is to sign up for my monthly Studio class so I offer one hour long Studio class monthly for all of my students it's on zoom and it costs ten dollars per student to attend so in an effort to make things easy to sign up put this on the first page of each monthly invoice so if you want to sign up you just select the quantity to one or if you have three kids taking less Micheline you want them all to attend you just up the quantity to three and then that's it so you see a preview of what studio class is going to be like that month and there you go second page is the actual invoice so it says if they select anything from the first page the monthly Studio class it'll show up for them here but it doesn't for me because you don't know what they're going to choose so my template looks like this for 30 minute lessons if it's Viola lately I've just been changing this to Viola even though I have lots of templates so what I'll do is I just make sure that they're going to have four lessons and then I write in the date and the time for each lesson that way it's very clear to them when I am and when I'm not teaching and anything like that I will say in an email if I'm not teaching a certain date or if we need to possibly reschedule anything a way that you could make this a bit easier on yourself is you can just change the quantity of how many lessons they're going to have so if they're going to have four that month just change it to four just have that be the only thing in the invoice and then it'll charge them the price for four lessons that can be an easy thing to do so it shows you the subtotal total you can add a discount if you want I've done this before though usually I will just if they were sick or if I missed a lesson or something and I'm trying to refund them for a lesson I'll just make the price zero and then I'll just say credit from last month something like that um though I don't actually want to discount so here at the bottom you can choose what the due date should be you can make your due dates a bit different depending on what you want the easiest thing I've found to do is custom date so I try to send my invoices out around the 15th of the month before but lately it's been getting to like 28th of the month or something like that so there's no real good way to set like the first of the next month so what I do is just custom date and then I change it on the calendar to the day that I actually want it to be due now it comes to upcoming and then once I send this invoice to them it will show like payment upcoming from this person and then it'll show me exactly when they pay it and give me an estimate of when it'll come into my bank account after that is all good I press the share button and it comes up with a template for an email to actually link them to the invoice so I'll usually title it may violin invoice it automatically inputs their first name but if you want to do something different just delete it and write in their name and then if I have any announcements I'll just write those in here I won't be teaching May 6th something like that um and then I can put in my name and I have an email signature saved in here so I can just add that quickly on and it looks nice and professional then once they get it it will look like this they just press the button to actually go to the invoice and pay it so it's all encrypted and they can pay with a credit card or bank transfer it's just very nice just like ordering anything else online so it's very very simple and it works for all of my students thankfully okay let's talk about Zoom so Zoom is what I use for all of my online lessons and my monthly Studio classes and recitals or at least like online based things like that so what I use is just one meeting ID one link for all of my students for all of my lessons for all of my studio classes so that is just my personal meeting ID that Zoom created for me back at the start um when I first started doing this so it is just simply that meeting I started here I am and all of my students have this link so when it's time for their online lesson they just come here and I'm here and it's easy one Zoom link if I have back to back students the next student just joins my current student will leave when they're done I bring in the next person next student comes in current student leaves I bring the next person in super nice works really well my main reasoning for sticking with zoom is because of all of the audio settings so what you want to have are these settings um first make sure to uncheck the Box this is automatically adjust microphone volume because that will sometimes lift the levels when you're talking and lower them when you're playing what we really want to focus on though is audio profile so you want to be sure to have original sound for musician selected and High Fidelity music mode if you're playing without headphones and you notice a lot of echoing going on you can check echo cancellation I wear my airpods for this very reason Echo cancellation does degrade the sound a little bit um but if you don't have headphones and if you're getting a lot of Echoes then it be worth it also there's this new polls and quizzes feature I used this in a studio class my March Studio class which which was about Irish fiddling I created a poll and I was like which song that we listened to was your favorite and then they could just interact that way instead of of like shouting out answers all at the same time so that's a cool feature that I want to use more in my group Studio classes that's the main overview of Zoom I've shown a couple more in-depth things on my channel just check out the cards if you want to see those is my no flight homepage this is where I do all of my arranging for students and potentially to sell things too because that's something that I've just started I haven't mentioned it here on this channel but I've started selling some of my arrangements through arrange me which just publishes your sheet music Arrangements on the popular sheet music purchasing sites like Sheet Music Plus musicnotes.com places like that so I'll show you a little bit of what I've been doing for piano student this is from now on from the greatest Showman I got just the regular piano vocal guitar part and I want to make this into an easy piano piece so um I stopped right about here so the second page is more what it originally looked like so this is a little bit too in-depth for the student that I'm making this for so what I did was I copied the vocal line and I pasted it into the right hand piano part because I want the lyrics to still be in there and really she's mostly just going to be playing the melody line in the right hand anyway then what I'm doing is I'm thinning out these cords so it looks like the chord is C sharp minor though okay so actually look what I did first this was originally an E major I wanted to avoid all those Sharps so I just put it down into C major and I believe that these chords yeah these chords did not stick through so C sharp would be the six chord in E so in C that would be a so this should just be an a and I just keep that a whole note I'm going to put them up the octave so her hands are close together and that will help if she needs to play some low notes in right hand the left hand can kind of just take over for them so once I'm done arranging this I can actually publish it or like put it up for sale so the way that I can do this is I go to score details um cell it's their arrange me and then first I need to actually purchase it I started arranging it um and it didn't make me purchase it first so I will have to buy it and then I can sell it as my own Arrangement and make money off of it another way that I've been using noteflight recently is is with play score which is my most recent video if you're watching this as it was just uploaded so one that I did from play score was this song by Imagine Dragons for one of my students this was originally someone else's arrangement from musescore I scanned it put it into play score and then exported it as an XML file and uploaded it into note flight part of this Arrangement was just too difficult for her and she wanted it down an octave and it does fit a little bit better for a beginning violinist down an octave which is where I put it so it imported into note flight a couple rhythms were a little off and there's like extra threes in there from the triplet groupings but um I made it work and it was so much more simple than inputting all of the notes one by one by hand so that's that's how I've been using note flight recently if you'd like a bigger overview of play score just check out my most recent video it'll be linked up in the eye all right if you've been watching my videos for a while at least my tech videos you've seen me talk about four score a million times by now but today I want to show you specifically a couple ways that I use it in my teaching every week so here I have a very very popular piece that students learn in the Suzuki book this is from the first Viola Suzuki book it's Minuet number three um so I just have it on my own I have scans of almost everything that I teach with because I can have this up and if I'm teaching online I just share my screen and then I can show them like hey I'm talking about this measure right now or um if they need a new fingering if they're learning about shifting which they're usually not in this piece I can write my own finger numbers up here and then it's easier than saying okay two four one two three like on these notes and then you know we get confused and it's a lot of talking so visually seeing it is usually so much easier so I use this both as a whiteboard also for me to just follow along with the student and it's easy to just have everything here the more things that I have scanned the smaller the pile of books on my desk gets through the week which is very nice I can also do things with different colors so if a student is having a hard time remembering what strings different notes are on I I'll usually just write the string name over here like this and I like to use a different color so that it doesn't get confusing with um different fingerings and stuff like that so one other thing that I really like about Force for particularly for teaching is that if I want to send these notes over to someone first of all I can just take a screenshot and I can put that into their Google doc notes but if they want like a PDF copy to print out with my specific markings on it tap on the music with my finger if you use your pencil it goes into automatic like annotation mode then go over to the three dots in the title bar then to the upload symbol then I choose annotated PDF now you can choose a page range so it looks like I'm on page 24 so that's all I want to share just type those numbers in or you can use the plus and minus and I can share and it gives me the option to send it to people usually I just airdrop it over to my computer and then email it out or you know send it off wherever it needs to go but it's very easy to share things through fourscore which is one of the reasons why I love to use it for teaching while we're on my iPad let's look at good notes next so good notes is this icon down in my home and I have this notebook called lesson notes I wonder if I can see how many pages it is 147 pages long so far this is just a notebook that I keep on the template is staff paper so I just open this up in a lesson if I need a whiteboard to talk through music or Draw Something out especially it's been helpful for my view lists who are starting to learn treble clef they'll learn one little like one line exercise and then they'll go okay let's try it in treble clef and I just write it out really quick um and it's nice that I have it here so if I'm in an online lesson I just share my screen and then use it as a whiteboard with whatever they need like talking through the space notes things like that sorry I did this stem the wrong way that was kind of dumb of me there we go um or if it's in person I just you know do this kind of thing and lots of good notes tutorials over here and I don't think I even know half the capabilities of this app but it's very nice to just pull something up and be able to write whatever I want some people will do the same thing in four score they'll just have a piece of blank staff paper like saved in four score and they'll just write on it but I think that I like the drawing and like writing capabilities in this a little bit better four score kind of bends my writing and I'm sure I can change that feature somewhere I just haven't um and this one I don't know just have easy access to all of these different colors I can easily change things and I can also import pictures so if I take a picture of someone's music I can put it in here and write on it even more this is helpful if we've got like a theory worksheet or something I'll just snap a picture of it if I don't already have it scanned then I just import it here as a picture it makes things pretty easy and pretty simple so here are some examples of how I've used it in the past this top one was a treble clef example of something that the student did in alto clef first but they were really high Ledger lines and we're learning treble clef anyway so just wrote it out in treble clef for her this is an example of a worksheet or just something that I want to write on just took a quick picture of it with my iPad and then put it in here to write on it here I took a screenshot from you score and then I wrote The Thing the fixed student more just note naming and this I wrote out kind of a string finger diagram for viola this is the C harmonic minor scale pattern where the student should put their fingers really helps her understand it visually so good notes is a great visual resource for teaching I really like it just as a whiteboard really another helpful app for music teaching that I found is Tom play which is a website app that a couple of my students have found their own pieces on so this is basically just a sheet music resource that also plays music with you and has backing tracks and I think the backing tracks and like the play along feature is really like the selling point that they try to make on this website so I've used this to find some undertale music for one specific student um I ended up kind of mixing together these two parts but here is one of them this is the more difficult one so it opens up the sheet music and I can't scroll for some reason with my trackpad on the iPad case but there's all the music for it if you pay for the membership which I do now you can easily print and this tells me how many prints I have left you get a hundred I guess for the year so if you want to play along you can you can choose how loud everything is so if you just want to play my karaoke style put the put the main instrument down to zero and you'll just hear the accompaniment you can change the tempo and it shows you where the recommended Tempo I guess uh goes you can play and you can also record yourself you can also write on it other settings are here but I find it helpful to just find different Arrangements of pieces for students here and they've also shown me things on here so it's helpful for me to download it I can look at the same exact sheet music that they're looking at as well so I haven't played around with this too much in depth yet but there it is I do find it a little bit difficult to search for things but they do have some cool collections which I would like to try out let's open this one define gravity would sound great on viola it does have five Sharps so it might be difficult for some students but it tells you intermediate level it always tells you the difficulty level right on the side there so there's that one and there's also classical sheet music on here this one's for viola and piano originally for cello but arranged her Viola easy to intermediate difficulty and it says with finger annotations so it probably has some recommended finger numbers in it I'm shifting and stuff like that so easy to find some stuff in here and if you want to just play things especially with backing tracks this is really fun I got oh look they have the viola Concerto in here which would be very helpful if you're learning it to easily just be able to play it with a Pianist at any speed that you want and play score is very similar you just have to do some of the work yourself by scanning it in first this is all just there and integrated in the app this one also has finger annotations as well um now let's go to play and then I can yeah so you can see the individual part as well which is very nice and you can also print it if you have a membership so helpful little app great place to find some sheet music in different Arrangements generally if I look for an arrangement of something this website will pop up in like the top five recommendations on Google so I I wasn't countering it a lot before I actually downloaded the app and really tested it out so good recommendation definitely something I'm going to look more into and if I find a lot of like tips and tricks and secrets in it then I might make a standalone video just on this so this is my hub for basically like everything I just upload and back up everything over Google Drive I have um the two terabyte plan with unlimited Google photo storage and I'm using up almost half of it I just had to back up a hard drive so that I could clear it and reuse it again um so I might offload some of these things just to give myself a little bit more room so one of the main ways that I use well there are so many ways that I use Google Drive but for teaching um I keep student notebooks in here so each student that I teach has a notebook through Google Drive and here's a template that I made I just put in their name right here there's the lesson Zoom link the actual clickable link so they can open this um and then just click right there and then when they're done they'll see everything that I've typed through the lesson and just a template for the font and everything so let's go to my fake one that I use all the time in YouTube videos this one is not formatted unfortunately but this is how I set it up I set up the date when you scroll down it goes back further in time so I'll write down what we've been working on things that they're doing well with they ways that I'd like them to practice and some tips that we've talked through and sometimes screenshots with finger numbers or if it's an exercise that they don't have maybe just a screenshot of an exercise that they can practice off of for the week so I just share that with each student and they can see it it updates simultaneously of course because it's through Google Drive and you know everything is up in the cloud I keep all of my sheet music here or at least like all of my scan sheet music is really what I mean so I have this divided out between like my own professional things and teaching um violin music is all kind of in there because I'm primarily realist so um anyway let's just stick in this folder so I have them divided out by different categories and I have just PDFs of sheet music a lot of this would be things that I've downloaded or arranged myself for violin and this is where I keep it if I have to share it with a student that I can just share them the link and then they can download it and print it out if they need to also just my own scans of books I do have this PDF this book saved in fourscore which is where I primarily read it from but I have it backed up here in case I ever need to reset my iPad delete everything it is always going to live right here I also have scans of Suzuki books in here and also just separate pieces from the Suzuki books as well so this is kind of just like my bookshelf of sheet music but you know all just scans and all online other than that I do have a folder of just music studio stuff and this is this is kind of a hub for everything one thing that I do share with students a lot are my recital folders so this is my first Halloween recital I have the recording I have a copy of the program and I have the group picture that we took so this folder has been shared a lot of times it's shared with all the parents and I tell the parents they can share it with their loved ones who couldn't make it live and want to see it or just want to re-watch it again so I do that with all of my recitals this is also where I keep backups of different games or um like games that actually work on Google so this is a game that I bought from Teachers Pay Teachers which we'll talk about very soon this is just a rhythm and counting game so you click on an acorn and it gives you a different Rhythm and then let me just go back you choose different ones any Clap The rhythms so that was a fun rhythm game that I shared with students back in the fall but things like that can just live here in Google Drive and it's easy for me to find it's easy to share when I need it this is where I keep my business bank account this is found um honestly I found it through an Instagram ad which I generally don't trust things through Instagram ads but I looked it up it's FDIC insured and all that so it's a real Bank and what I like about it is that all of the money that I make goes right in here and then um I after I told it different things about myself and how I plan to file my taxes it figures out an average of what I'm probably going to owe and it already sets that aside as soon as anything is deposited from my account so it takes an estimate of how much tax I'll have to pay off of that deposit and it just puts it right into a separate part of the account just for taxes so um the app is pretty easy to use you can send invoices through it but I don't do that personally and you can track all of your expenses through here and you can also upload receipts into the actual expense so that they're all saved somewhere that's easy to find and if you find an expense later on when you're doing your taxes and you're like what is this you can look at the receipt right there have kind of a reminder of what it's like hey teachers this is just a website where you can find helpful teaching resources and they're made by other teachers or you know it's kind of like Etsy but just with teaching resources people make their own things they upload them and sell them so I like to use this to find teaching resources specifically like games and things like that for when students aren't feeling well or if anyone is injured and they can't play these are helpful ways to still teach them in a fun way without you know it being really boring and without you know canceling lessons and losing money on my part I know a lot of my students would probably be interested in this one so you usually get a couple different formats included one of them is usually Google apps so you'll get like a Google slideshow or planning documents in Google Docs things like that but it also will come in like a zip file and you can just host them on your computer so let's see what this one includes or like what types of things we get three presents or oh just one presentation with different formats video Google Slides just resource sheet it looks like maybe some examples infographic two worksheets do more oh one one two three four five five worksheets um that's everything sometimes you can get one thing in a bundle with a lot of other things like this one this one um looks like this one is just video games and music but this one you can get that plus video games and sound in video game history so then you can save a little bit of money by buying all three of those things together if you're interested in those things so um that Acorn game that I showed you a couple minutes ago that was I found that on Teachers Pay Teachers let's see if yeah let's look at my purchases this is a helpful one that I just downloaded a couple weeks ago just fingering charts for viola oh all string instruments or all orchestral string instruments so I'm planning to use these when I teach accidentals sharp Splats Naturals um just to show where they are because you know you know if you're watching this and you play a string instrument you know how the fingerboard Works um but it's always it's almost always helpful for students to see things visually and I did buy this one because it has third position as well and I have a lot of violence and bills who are just starting third position and so this is going to be really helpful for them I think that gives you all a pretty good idea of Teachers Pay Teachers it's a website that lots of teachers use and I always find really helpful resources on there I personally use canva Pro which I really really highly recommend but the free version of canva is a great way to start out so I use canva for basically a lot of my Graphics my thumbnails anything you see that has been like edited or created through my channel my Instagram my website I probably made it on canva so you can see a couple of ways that I've used this programs thumbnails um different sizes of thumbnails for my website um kind of creating some screenshots of music into PDFs I started making a musical Era timeline so I'll create lots of different graphics and slide shows presentations things like that on here sometimes I'll even just take out canva graphics and put them on a blank background so I can use them in videos because that I found that that's just a pretty easy way to go about it so if you want to make a program on canva if you're a music teacher thinking about your spring recital this is how I made our Master Class program that's actually going to be later today I believe it started with this one possibly looks very similar but you can change the background color so usually I just make it white because that's easy for printing it looks like there's a background image some kind of thing back there yeah that's an image okay we'll delete that just to make it easy for printing and then we should probably make all of this black or at least some dark kind of color if you're planning to print this of course if you're not go for all the different colors so you can change this to whatever you want that's not actually what I call my private Studio but whatever um and then um things like that whatever whatever you want personally what I like to do for for my own programs find some kind of nice graphic put it somewhere like around the bottom like this I'd probably put like something else around it possibly maybe like some flowers or something small I don't know and then I go over to text add a heading so something like that and then details things like that and then I'll go here line it up in the middle and then we want to spread it out as far as we want it to go I'd usually just go with the square that it gives me and then we can we can keep it Center aligned and then whatever font we want for that one looks cool oh I like that one okay let's make it just a little bit larger and then the way that I like to lay out programs so I can't tab in here sorry you have to space but we'll get it all lined up we will and then composer's name waiting for it okay we're not there yet so I just keep spacing there's probably such an easier way to do this I have never figured it out in my years of making programs and then I type the name and the instrument two spaces and then next piece so that's the main way that I set a program sometimes I like to do a border let's see if I can just easily search for a border I love all the elements on canva this one's kind of cool it doesn't super well maybe it kind of goes with the graphic on the bottom I would be a little bit smaller copy paste put it the same way down here and then flip like that something like that you can do it on all sides I usually just like to do two but then it makes it a little weird with this so you can you can do something else I find it easier to make things pretty in here than it is on Google Docs or Microsoft Word I don't even have word installed on this new computer since I'm not a student and I don't I don't get it for free anymore I I just only use Google and Keva this one's also a nice one if you're doing a spring recital and you just want something on the bottom oh that's a really nice one it would even look nice like on the top and bottom we'll just flip that let's make them different colors too let's make it that color nice see we're getting somewhere already it's just easy to make things look very presentable and clean cut and professional in here so there's an overview of what I use through the week on both my computer my iPad basically anywhere so I hope that you enjoyed that if you use any other teaching resource that I didn't mention today and you think would be very helpful for myself or others please leave it in a comment down below if you have any questions about what I shared today please also leave that down below as well thank you so much for watching I've also officially decided to just post videos every other week because I now have between like 32 and 35 students now and it's getting really really busy so I can only really focus on making one high quality video every other week instead of reliably every week so there you go I hope to still provide high quality videos for you just a little bit less often so that they can still be good if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and you'll see new videos from me every other Sunday at noon eastern time thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music]