Smart Music

I was trying to think of some technology tools that I have used in the past to teach music, and I came across "Smart Music." Some of you may be familiar with Smart Music. I first used it during one of my student teaching placements. Smart Music is a computer program designed for students to help with practicing. It does so much to help the student. It has a variety of levels of exercises, and has a huge library of repertoire for each instrument so the student can hear a solo piece they are working on. Let's say we are talking about a clarinet student working on a clarinet and piano piece. The student may choose to play through the piece, or sections of it, along with the clarinet. He or she can eliminate the piano part so they can listen to their accuracy with their instrument. In the same respect, the student is also able to eliminate the clarinet part and play along only with the piano part. This is great for many things, one of them being ensemble. Especially when you are teaching in a school with a ton of students and limited one-on-one teacher/student time, this is a wonderful tool.

Another thing I particularly love about this program for the students is that the student has control over the tempo. The program also will respond to mistakes by marking what was wrong in which measure. This is great to train the student, because the student can go back and listen to the correct way, and then the way they played it.

The teacher I was working with at this particular placement used Smart Music for student homework. Especially around competition times such as NYSSMA and All-County, he would have students do specific things with Smart Music, and then the student would burn their recorded progress on to a cd or simply email it to the teacher. That is another wonderful thing about this program because the student can not only listen back to themselves, but within that practice time where the teacher could not interact with the student, the teacher could still listen to it afterwards and help the student out with things. I think this is a very productive way to handle the inconvenience of time and student to teacher ratio that so often interferes with teachers being able to give individual attention to students.

I think this is a great program to use with your students if you are teaching music, especially in a middle school and high school. It engages the students and makes practicing a little more fun. It gives feedback when there may be no one around to do so, and it is very interactive. I think this is something that would have helped a lot of students stick with playing had it been around while I was a younger student.