Piano Maestro Offers a Fun Way to Learn to Read and Play Sheet Music

Cross-posted from one of my other blogs, iPadApps4School.com

Piano Maestro (formerly known as Piano Mania) is a neat iPad app from Joy Tunes. The new Piano Maestro app offers lessons on playing the piano. Students place their iPads on their pianos or electronic keyboards to view the lesson as they play along. The app offers challenges of varying difficulty from simple one-hand lessons to complex lessons requiring the use of both hands. Students earn points for completing each lesson and mastering new songs. Teachers can check their students’ progress by having students use the “connect to teacher” feature of Piano Maestro.

Piano Maestro is free to download and access for basic lessons. More difficult lessons and the larger catalog of music requires purchasing the premium features. But this fall Joy Tunes is offering Piano Maestro’s premium features for free to registered music teachers and their students. The premium features includes a library of more than 800 songs including pop music songs from artists like Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift.

Mark Your Calendar for an Afternoon of Free Webinars About Google Apps

As I mentioned last Monday, on October 7th Simple K12 is hosting an afternoon of free webinars about Google tools for teachers. I will be conducting two webinars that afternoon. In my webinars I'll share some of my favorite Google Search strategies, ideas for teaching search strategies, and using Google Forms and Spreadsheets to streamline workflow. Click here to register for this free PD opportunity.

The webinars will start at 1pm Eastern Time and run until 5pm Eastern Time. I realize that the schedule is troublesome for a lot of teachers. I asked Simple K12 about availability of the recordings. This was the reply, SimpleK12’s webinar recordings are available to Full Access members of their site and are available 24-48 hours after the event. If you don’t have your membership, we recommend signing up for the Free Live Event you are interested in so that you can receive email notices of similar future events. Another similar event is being scheduled for the end of October. I will pass on those details when I have them.

These free webinars are designed for folks who are new to using Google tools.  Teachers who would like to pick up some tips for teaching others how to take advantage of the great things that Google has to offer will also enjoy the content of these webinars. Click here to register.

Disclosure: I am being compensated for my time in these webinars.