Oh, the humanity...

“User Interface affects everything Humans interact with. Even other humans. Simplicity, clarity, elegance: chase these ‘til you’re exhausted.”

—	Andy Inathko

Happy New Year - officially. Well, in the Western world, where Gregory's calendar reigns supreme. I write this as the Julian calendar reached Christmas. What a marvellous world - not knowing when the year ends, let alone what year it is! I always take the first day of school as my New Year's commencement, greeting one and all with, "Happy New Year!". 

(Get on with it, Ed.)

Right. Andy Ihnatko is one of my favourite "go to" guys for interesting tech writing. He has been around side the days of the Apple II. Younger readers, look it up - the young Steves had a revolutionary product before 1984. Or 2007. Or 2010. "Simplicity, clarity, elegance…" - brings to mind "Sunday in the Park with George" with the Sondheim dictum, "Order, design, composition, tension, balance, harmony."

Apple is renowned for attention to detail, and no where is so obvious as the user interface. Many of you are unwrapping iPads and iPhones and wondering where to start. Jobs famously said, "If you see a stylus or a task manager, 'they blew it'." Apple designed the interface mimicking the keyboard, but limited space on the device put paid to the original design. Here are the "tricks" to make typing as easy at q,w,e. I mean, 1 2 3!

Today's Tip: Keyboard Tricks for your iPad and iPhone

When using the on-screen keyboard, press and hold down keys to reveal alternatives to the character that appears. 

Press and hold the "a" key to have your choice of ã, å, ā, à, a, á, â, ä, and æ. Works for capitals as well. 

Press and hold the " key and have your pick of «  „  ”  “  ».

Press and hold the "£" key to display ₩, €, $, ¢, ¥. 

Go on - press and hold all the keys to see what pops up.

Rather than switching to the number keyboard and then switching back to the letter keyboard, tap and hold the "123" key, then drag it to a number to select it. When you lift your finger from the number, the letter keyboard will appear again.

Double-tap the space bar to end your sentences with a period and a space. 

In your Home Screen, tap 'Settings' the 'General' and then 'Keyboard' and set up International Keyboards, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and even Emoji! Then a tap on the 'Globe' key enables you to change keyboards. 

Tricks for your iPad only.

Press and hold the 'hide keyboard' at the bottom right of your  keyboard and 'Unlock' and 'Split' buttons appear. 'Unlock' moves the bar off the bottom of the screen and 'Split' enables you to do 'thumb typing'.  Adjust the keyboard position by lightly touching the 'Hide Keyboard' key and dragging it up or down. Press and hold  'Hide Keyboard' again to dock, split, merge or dock and merge. 

You have to change habits to work in a tablet environment. The cloud forces a limit to how much you can take along with you. Go with the flow. Use you music player on your phone, pad or netbook with a severely limited playlist. You have a stand-alone music player for that. Use the camera on your phone for the "bread and butter" shots - sync to Dropbox or iCloud or one of the dedicated sites like Smugmug or Flickr. You'll be amazed at the resolution that you have at your disposal and camera apps are, literally, .99 pence. Try some out! 

I'm going to close here with thoughts that are appropriate for commencing on a journey, for teaching is a life-long journey of discovery.

“May you reflect upon the positive aspects of the past, plan and hope for the future, but most of all, realize that we have to live and adapt most readily in the present.”

and

“None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”

—	Henry David Thoreau

Keep on experimenting!

Rick Hein

It all starts out with an idea...

You don't get taken with the colors of paints that you've got. You've got to narrow it down. It's great to have all the possibilities, but it all starts with an idea.

To sit there and hope something will happen is like dumping 400 gallons of paint on the floor and hoping a picture is going to emerge. It doesn't work that way.

Michael Nesmith
Wired News

Who is this visionary popular artist, some of you might be saying. Those of you who have studied American popular culture or were teenagers between 1966 and 1969 will recognise him immediately. He was the Monkee with the woolly hat. Since those early days, he has been credited with inventing MTV, spearheading the country rock genre, and writing one of the first online novels.

The genesis of this inventing spirit may become a little clearer when you learn that his mother invented Liquid Paper™. She was divorced, down to her last dime and mortgaged the house to go into production. Little Michael and his friends packed the boxes and delivered the product on their bicycles. He came from a family of innovators and people willing to risk everything on what they believe.

Daniel Barenboim, in the Reith Lectures for the BBC, claims that the musical journey is not the result of the movement from A to G. Rather it is the journey from silence to A that is the heart of the musical journey. You've heard it before in this space: great art is born of restraint. Here are two musicians from wildly different genres adding their voices to the argument.

One of my composition teachers gave the assignment to write a piece, less than three minutes, using only one note. It could be used in any octave, but only that one note. By constraining the melodic and harmonic content, we were forced to explore rhythm, repetition, variation and dynamics. This stretched our compositions into a new path. We had to "think different" to solve the problem. Whilst the pieces weren't masterworks, when we played them at the next lesson we were all amazed at the variety of compositions that appeared.

When we are using our new sequencers, whether they be Garageband, Logic, Amadeus, or whatever the newest latest tool is, we must remember that in order to learn to use the tool, we must structure the approach with appropriate restraints in order to allow invention to take place. In using today's loop based sequencers, one of the key skills is editing. How can you take the material presented and modify it to fit your needs? Add notes? Subtract notes? Transpose? The wise teacher amongst us then asks the student to explain why they made that choice. The answers may in the first instance be, "Because it sounds better." The educator in you won't let that answer stand. You'll look for a way in to see what the student is thinking.

As you follow the curve of the year keep thinking differently and looking for new creative approaches for your students. Look for the ways of getting them to own the music and the music making process. If you have the access to technology, create some "wacky" composition projects. Who knows – great beauty and a deeper understanding of music may be born from your constraints.

Only the beginning

Somewhere
Inside something there is a rush of
Greatness
Who knows what stands in front of
Our lives
I fashion my future on films in space
Silence
Tells me secretly
Everything
Everything

James Rado & Gerome Ragni
“The Flesh Failures” from Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

We start this year as we do every new year at the same place that every piece of music ever written or improvised begins: with an inhalation of breath in silence. All of our journeys lie before us. The ground before us is untrodden. The plough has yet to break the soil. In our ears and in the air around us are the reverberations of the past.

We may have a plan for our journey this year. Concepts, style, manner, repertoire and expectations are some of the things we bring to the door of our classrooms. Our students will return to school refreshed and changed from the students who left at the end of the previous year. Not only because of the transient nature of the international school. Our students are growing and changing daily and they certainly did not stop over the summer. How many times has your best treble boy singer left in June excited about the prospect of Middle School Honor Boy’s Choir and not returned in the autumn because the family has suddenly been transferred to a new city?

You have been changed over the summer as well. You have reflected on your season and made mental (or physical) notes about what to do differently. You may have taken part in a workshop or course that has radically revised your pedagogical approach. You may have explored, if you followed the advice in last year’s finale, new software and played your way into a new appreciation and understanding of technology or even a new instrument. Whilst we expect our rate of growth and change to be somewhat slower than out students, we are all still growing and changing.

One tip from the world of the technology is the excellent iTunes Store. It used to be the iTunes Music Store, but it has grown and expanded with the addition of movie and TV rentals and sales, the iPhone Applications Store, and iTunes U.

ITunes U is a companion to the wonder that is YouTube. The Observer recently ran a feature on the 50 Greatest Arts Videos On YouTube. http://tinyurl.com/5ru4uu Here is a teaser from their Jazz section - John Coltrane performs 'My Favourite Things', 1961; Billie Holiday sings 'Strange Fruit', 1959; Ella Fitzgerald duets with Dinah Shore, 1960s; Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie perform 'Hot House', 1952; Barbra Streisand on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, 1961.

Fine art performances abound as well – Nureyev dancing The Nutcracker, Jack Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied by the jazz stylings of Steve Allen, Callas, Von Karajan, Bernstein. Follow the tinyurl link above and then start searching to compile your list of performances.

Back to iTunes U. I open iTunes (free ar http://www.apple.com/itunes/) and go to the iTunes Store. I click on iTunes U. At first glance I see Smithsonian Folkways Recordings for those looking for archive recordings of folk and world music. There are videos, discussions of music and technology and an outlined series of lesson plans using Smithsonian videos and music to introduce music of world cultures. I do a search for Jazz History in the iTunes store and find the NPR Podcasts. First few titles: Jimmy Smith: Organ Grinder Swing; Village Vanguard: A hallowed basement; Betty Carter: Fiercely Individual. How About Marin Alsop’s Clueless About Classical Music, also in the podcast area.

Best thing about these resources? They are free. Yes. Free.

Download iTunes, go to the iTunes Music Store, stock up your library of teaching resources for free. That should help fill your year with the colourful reverberations of happy voices and instruments.