063 – Amy Talks “Favorite Digital Tools” with Carly Walton

Episode Summary

Amy chats with Carly Walton about some of their favorite “digital tech tools,” from browser extensions to cloud storage, website builders, social media scheduling, and more.

(This episode first aired as Episode 109 of the Teach Music Online Podcast “The Best Tools and Tech for Studio Success w/ Guest Amy Chaplin“)

In 2018, Carly began developing business and tech courses for instrumental music teachers to help them build a global online music studio. Since then she has created several courses focusing on digital marketing, website building, and online course creation. Her courses have been used by teachers worldwide and her online community has grown to 10,000+ teachers. Her favorite topics to teach and coach include: technology for online teaching, mindset for business growth, online teaching engagement, and digital marketing for studios. In addition to her membership community, she enjoys interviewing other experts for her weekly podcast, the Teach Music Online Podcast. 

Items Mentioned

Lesson Planning: A King-Sized Master Spreadsheet

Note Rush Assignment Series

Save Time and Money Taking Payments with Coinhop

Digital Organization Small-Group Coaching for Piano Teachers

Transcript

Amy: Last month, Carly Walton invited me to be a guest on her Teach Music Online podcast to talk about some of my favorite digital tools. Since, like me, Carly also loves talking about technology and digital resources for teaching, I asked if we could make it more of a conversation where we both shared favorites, so we could let the episode do double duty for both of our podcasts.

She enthusiastically agreed, so today I’m sharing our conversation, which aired a couple of weeks ago on March 20th, 2023, as episode number 109 of the Teach Music Online podcast. Carly and I cover a large range of digital tech tools from browser extensions to cloud storage, website builders, social media scheduling, and more.

I think we both gleaned a couple of new ideas from each other, so I’m confident you too will find at least one new and useful tool to add to your mix.

Carly Walton is from Mesa, Arizona, and lives near Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband and three daughters. In 2013, after some of her piano students moved out of state, she decided to experiment with teaching piano lessons online. Carly shifted her studio exclusively online in 2017, which allowed her to travel to 15 countries with her husband and baby girl, all while still teaching.

In 2018, Carly began developing business and tech courses for instrumental music teachers. To help them build a global online music studio. Since then, she has created several courses focusing on digital marketing, website building, and online course creation. Her courses have been used by teachers worldwide and her online community has grown to over 10, 000 teachers. Her favorite topics to teach and coach include technology for online teaching and mindset for business growth. online teaching engagement and digital marketing for studios.

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Carly: This is so fun. I’m so excited. Since we both love doing podcasts and talking about resources and tools, let’s talk about some tools, for those listening Amy and I have. Quite the extensive list. So we might need to do a part two, but let’s start and just see where it takes us.

So the first thing we wanted to talk about was lesson planning and lesson assignments. I actually just created a new section in the teach music online course, where I go through all of the different avenues or ways or methods for lesson assignments. So, this is fresh on my mind, but why don’t you go ahead and share a couple of your favorite tools for creating lesson assignments for students? What are some of yours?

Amy: In the old days, I used to use just an Excel spreadsheet, and I actually created this really beautiful, massive spreadsheet that I would use for my students, and I could see all my students in one column, and then I could see it by the entire week, so I could see all of it in one place.

So Excel, while it’s an old-fashioned thing, it’s still digital, and I don’t do it that way right now anymore, for lesson planning, necessarily, but man, sometimes I’ve considered going back to that because it’s just such a nice way to see everything in one place. However, now that things have gone online so much more, we went through the whole COVID thing, I’m now using Tonara for all my lesson assignments.

And, I just love it. It’s not perfect. There are other programs out there, but so far, it’s working great. I especially love that you can attach files for students, audio recordings so they can listen to it at home. I attach like echo patterns, rhythm patterns, and stuff for students to do at home.

And I can also chat with them if they need to. Sometimes they’ll send me recordings that they’re playing or say, Hey, Miss Amy, I thought that I was supposed to do this assignment, but it’s not listed. Did you miss it? So we can communicate freely and easily that way. So, right now, Tonara is working great for me.

Carly: I love Tonara, especially, I think, during the pandemic; Tonara was one of the only apps doing such a good job with that. At the time, I was teaching teachers just to use Google Docs and have a Google Doc, and you share it with the parent, and they can see you typing in information in real time. And still, to this day, when teachers want a free option, Google Docs is amazing because you can just, you can link your videos, you have a record of all their assignments.

I usually would have parents print out the pages and have ’em during the week. Two new ones that I’m hearing are great: our practice space and one of the teachers that I know really well created one called Music Nest, and he has a different, a little bit of a different approach where he calls them song cards. Instead of assignments and your song cards are color-coordinated based off of where they’re at in progress. So if you’re just previewing it, it’s like really light. If it’s something that you’re finished and passed off and done, it’s like a darker color. And anyway, it’s really cool. And we can link, we’ll link everything in the show notes and caption for those watching this later.

Amy: So those are some. I know there’s another one out there that’s been developed. It’s fairly new that I, I. I created an account for, but I haven’t really had time to play around with, but I’m curious about it. I think it’s called Meta-practice. So I’m sure there’s going to be more popping up, but it’s good for teachers to have some options now, and

Carly: I think teachers need to know with everything we suggest today, there’s not.

I don’t think either of us would say this is the one you need to use. It’s all about what you’re trying to accomplish with these tools and your personality, and how you learn things. If it’s, if you’re visual or whatever it is, testing things out is going to help you find, Oh, this is the one that solves my problems.

Amy: Yeah. It’s how your brain works, right? How does your brain work?

Carly: Yes. Let’s talk about apps and games. Of course, there is an extensive list, but do you have a few top apps that you always use with your students?

Amy: I do. Note rush. I just use all the time. I just love the fact that it’s connected to what students play directly on the piano. It’s just not naming a note with a letter name. And the kids really love playing it. They get to play it right on the piano, and it’s quick moving, and it responds to them. I actually started using it. I use it so regularly in my lessons that I finally created a progressive series of assignments, basically, that I use.

And it’s not so much assignments, but I use it so that I can keep track of what notes I’ve worked with them on. And so I, you know how you can create a link and share it in NoteRush? So you can attach it into Tonara. I just created a whole repertoire series in Tonara for NoteRush that’s progressive, and it’s just numbered like one, two, and three. Then, the student works on that level. Then the next week they get the next level and it has, it’s already preloaded.

Yeah, so that’s actually available on my website if anybody’s interested, but it’s just made it so much easier to just track student progress. We do that just a little bit in every single lesson with most of my students who are in the process of learning all their notes.

I also really like my students; I should say that Staff Wars is a fun one. It’s Star Wars, so when they hit the name of the button, it shoots the note out of the sky, and then it keeps getting faster and faster. So that one’s super fun. They really loved Ningenious and Flashnote Derby, maybe not quite as much, but yeah, they enjoy all of those.

And usually those are like rewards. Like we do Note Rush a little bit in every lesson, but then if we have some extra time at the end or something, or they just requested, or just need a brain break, then I’ll just let them pick an app for fun. Yeah, that’s great.

Carly: I love the brain breaks. I think sometimes as teachers, we’re a little too on, on an agenda, too much on an agenda that we forget that they might need that.

Amy: I like sometimes doing just like maybe one or two pieces, and then, okay, let’s take one minute to do an app real quick, and then we’ll go back to another piece, and then maybe do another app or something. Good to break it up in the lesson.

Carly: Yeah, and for teachers listening who are teaching online, if you are wondering how you use apps during online lessons, there are several ways you can share your screen, and you would have the student tell you what the answers are, so you just click it for them, or you can have the student, it’s tricky without showing, but you can have the student on their iPad actually leave the call, they just go to the window, they do the quiz, and then they just hop back right on, so it wouldn’t ever end the Zoom call or whatever platform it is, it would just Have them go to that and then come back. So that’s one way to have the student do it as well. But there are ways I get a lot of teachers. For example, how do I do this online? There definitely are ways to still make it interactive online.

Amy: Do you ever use like Boom cards or Sproutbeat? Are you familiar with Sproutbeat?

Carly: Yes. I love Sproutbeat. And I was going to say Note Quest. Sproutbeat is so good because they have just. a huge library of resources games, and activities for theory. Note Quest is amazing. It’s progressive sight reading, and she has a really fantastic method for teaching sight reading skills, both with rhythms and note reading. It gets pretty advanced. So, I would say those are two apps that I recommend.

Okay. Creating a curriculum map. This is a fun one. How do you go about doing this or teaching teachers to do this?

Amy: I’m actually currently working on something. I really haven’t had a whole map out. Where I’m like working students through things is in my mind; of course, you use method books to help you along the way, but I’ve been working on something that’s in progress that is doing that.

And the idea is developing okay. Here are some expectations of concepts or skills that we’re learning. In, say, the first year of lessons, and a lot of times, I would send emails or updates to parents and say, Hey, this is what we’re doing so far. This is what they’re learning. These are some of the goals, and I was like, what if I had more tangible things? So, I’m working in Google Drive right now. And just actually using a table and just listing. Okay. In year one, what are just the general expectations of things we might be learning in piano lessons. And then I have three little columns where I just track like. Okay, they’re learning. They’re just newly being introduced to this. And then they’re progressing. So they know the concept already, but we’re still learning it, solidifying it, getting more comfortable. And then master would be like, okay, they don’t really need to review this at all anymore. They finally understand the concept of sharps and flats, on the piano. So, that is considered completely mastered. We don’t really need to practice that much.

Carly: Is that something you would have created a table for each student, and then you would mark this, or you’re just saying that would be like the overall outline?

Amy: So yeah, so the idea that I’m working on is it’s like one page and then I would just duplicate the page for every student. So, I would just make a copy of it and then name it for that student. And then that student that I can just check in each checkbox, like where they’re at in each part of the process or each concept or whatever that we’re learning.

And then you could even use that as an evaluation kind of a thing too, like showing, okay, here are things that we’ve been working on this year. Here are some things that we haven’t quite mastered. Here are some things that we’re just starting to learn. And it would just be a way of helping you as a teacher, like you said, create a curriculum map, like a progressive, step-by-step process. And it’s not all black and white. We know that.

Carly: Yeah, that’s the next level of organization.

Amy: Yeah. And I love it. It’s still in progress. So, like I said, I’ve not really ever used anything that much up until now, but it’s in my brain. I’m trying to get it out.

Carly: Yeah, and I, this is a step I have teachers do when they go through the online teaching certification. They create a curriculum map, and I show them how to do that. And I think the benefits of having a curriculum map are amazing. If you think of, almost any other subject taught – they all have a curriculum, and they all have a framework, and something they follow. I think we shouldn’t be the exception to that.

I think it’s worth spending some time conceptualizing and thinking about what the progress of a student and then, to take it another level, so doing exactly what you said, coming up with the milestones and then are they hitting those milestones maybe at what level, but then maybe what’s really helpful for teachers is listing out all of their library of resources for each of those levels as something they can grab and paste into a lesson. F

or example. All of the books you use are likely in Amazon, most of them, and grab your Amazon links in advance so at the end of a lesson, you open that curriculum map, copy that link, and put it in their folder, their digital folder. It just makes it so much easier to know where you’re taking a student.

Amy: I think the tricky thing can be when you use multiple, if you’re someone that uses multiple methods and maybe not just one method, every method is a little bit different. So just trying to come up with like more of a general, maybe that doesn’t, maybe if you use a couple of set ones, you could do specifics like tied directly to what that method is. But can you come up with a general one that could also be used for any student, no matter what? Material you have them working through, and finding that balance can be tricky.

Carly: Oh, absolutely. I just interviewed a teacher who’s one of our members, and he’s a guitar teacher and piano teacher. He also has a really unique approach to curriculum, where he doesn’t have one method. And he focuses really on catering to the needs of the student and where they’re at with their reading, where they’re at Really mentally with music and their interests, and he starts them also differently. So I said to him like, okay, then how are you creating your curriculum map? Cause he knows I teach that.

Yeah. He still does it. He still does it, but it’s, it looks a little different. So, I think anyone listening might be thinking I don’t have one method. It doesn’t need to be one method. It is. More about concepts and being able to see visually, you know what those look like in order and where you take a student.

Amy: And that’s why I’m trying to develop this; I don’t always use method books. I like using a lot of just supplementary repertoire and just having that framework that I can then follow and keep myself in check and keep track of where students are at without having to rely on a method book to walk you through like where they’re at.

Carly: Yes. Cool. I love it. We’re going to move on to talking about business management. This could be and is a webinar in itself, but I love you put this on here. Why do you, what, why do you want to talk about this, or why did you think this would be a great topic?

Amy: Because that’s half of what we do, isn’t it? We need tools to help us run our studios and our business and to make it manageable and not just feel like it’s every which way we need to have things to help us along the way. So yeah, I think it’s important.

Carly: Thankfully, there are so many tools now, it’s almost like you have your own team working with you, but you’re not paying them individually, you’re just paying a software. I always tell teachers that think of it, think of these tools that you’re now paying for as assistants, and these assistants are going to take hours of time away from you, not away from you, they’re going to, I said that backward, but they will save hours of time, not take your time, they’re going to save you time and do some of that previous Invoicing that you used to do manually.

So a few different topics. The first one would be invoicing and billing. The top ones that come to my mind are Fonz, MyMusicStaff, and Duet Partner. Those are all fantastic ones.

Amy: Yeah, I have been using MyMusicStaff. For quite a few years since they first rolled out, honestly, I have mostly been just using it to invoice my annual payments and semester payments and track my students. I am not currently using it for scheduling or monthly payments or anything like that. I actually use CoinHop for my monthly payments and I have loved CoinHop for years. And several reasons. One, their fee is much lower than. Some of the other ones that you connect, what is it, Square, or what’ssome of the other ones?

Carly: I think all of them that I’ve seen are 2. 9 percent plus 30 cents. So what’s your fee?

Amy: CoinHop, I think, is 1 percent still. It’s very low. And what I can do is I just basically say in my policies that you can either make an annual payment or I used to do semester payments, but I’ve even cut that out recently because I only had a few students that did that.

You can make an annual payment, or if you choose to pay monthly, then you’re required to connect your bank account to CoinHop. So I don’t really give them options give me a credit card here, pay me with PayPal I just say, nope, this is the one place I’m getting it. It just automatically comes out of their account on the first day of the month. And it takes eight to ten days to hit my bank account, which, as long as you know when to expect your payment, is the same about every month. And it comes in one payment. So I’m not getting all these multiple deposits into my account. It’s just one payment and I know it’s all tuition. Their customer service has been fabulous. Like any time I’ve had any of the slightest little things, their response is very quick and helpful. So I highly recommend it.

Carly: Is it basically a button that you’re setting up for them to click through and then it’ll ask them like to connect? It all, or I just send them a link.

Amy: Yeah. So, I’ll add them as a client in my account. And then I send them an invitation either via text or through email, and it will link to them into Coinhop. And then they set up their account basically through there. So it’s then up to them, and it’ll go through the promise, the process of adding a few cents into their account and making sure it’s there and then.

Then it gets approved, and it’s set up and ready to go. If you need to, you can edit the monthly payments. from month to month if you would need to for any reason, but otherwise, it’s just all on auto set up, and it just processes every month.

Carly: That’s great. And I think we would suggest that to teachers who are doing recurring monthly or semesterly, not teachers who are still, to my dismay, doing a different rate each month, depending on how many lessons they have.

We still have teachers, that are making that leap, thinking, Oh, I hope nobody gets mad at me. They’re not going to get mad at you. It’s how the world runs. Okay. Coin hop. That’s a great one to link to. I had actually not, that has not been one suggested to me yet. So that’s great. Okay.

Video calling software. Again, great topic. Forte lessons. I still have a ton of teachers using Zoom and Rock Out Loud Live are the top three. Do you have any others that you?

Amy: I don’t do online lessons regularly at all anymore. After COVID, I’ll do the occasional one if a student is feeling under the weather; we’ll just talk online.

Most of the time we end up using FaceTime, sometimes Zoom. It just depends, like with some students I get better. Quality through FaceTime than I do Zoom, just depending on what their internet speed is. I use Zoom for my podcast recordings and other stuff. So it’s just easy to use also for my student stuff when I need it, rather than having something separate like Forte or whatever. So, I don’t really have any experience with some of the other online platforms like you might. Yeah,

Carly: I think the one thing I would say, this is a recent conversation with some teachers, is if you’re having issues With your video calling software. That’s when I recommend looking for an alternative or if there’s a calling software that doesn’t do what you want it to do. There are so many options now that you should be able to find one that does what you need it to do if you need to record the lesson or you need a whiteboard or you need to be able to share video or have a second camera like There are so many now that there is no excuse. And if you’re having audio issues, we just had a call, I think two days ago and a teacher was saying, Oh, watch this one student as the worst. It just drops the call, and then I have to get on a different software. And it’s not the software when that happens. It’s the internet connection. It’s the internet connection for the student, not likely, not the teacher because they’ve already figured that out.

In that case, I have a checklist that you send the student. Are you close to the router? Are you connected to high-speed internet? Is no one else in the home streaming Netflix? Can you plug an ethernet cable in? There are so many things we can do to make sure that students have a better experience online.

Okay, let’s talk about website building. I use Squarespace. I’ve used it for years. My husband is a really good designer, marketer, and business person. So he taught me how to use Squarespace. And now I think it’s easy enough for most teachers to use it. So that’s where my experience is. What is your experience with WordPress? I’m maybe thinking.

Amy: I have been using WordPress for my Piano Pantry blog. That’s where I started on that. And I’ll tell you what, it is definitely a. learning curve in the early days. Now there’s wordpress.com and then there’s wordpress.org. I’m using wordpress.org, which it gives you your own domain name. I think there are some benefits to doing it; I think there’s a little bit more customization that you can do with WordPress.org as opposed to wordpress.com. I honestly wouldn’t recommend WordPress to most teachers.

Carly: That’s usually what I’d say. You usually need a developer or have an, or already have experience building websites, then it’s great because it’s so customizable.

Amy: Or just be a little bit crazy and willing to try to figure out like I did.

Carly: If you want to, yeah. But you did that before, I would say, there were so many other tools being advertised.

Amy: That’s true. Yeah. So, I also used Weebly in the early days for my local association. I have a website that I currently still use on Weebly. And I’ll tell you what, I would definitely recommend Weebly still to teachers. It’s very easy, drag and drop. It’s very visual. It’s very user-friendly. And I have not used Squarespace. I’ve been wanting to look into it just to see because I know it makes beautiful websites, and everything I hear is it’s pretty user-friendly. Yes. But Weebly is very much the same way. So yeah, I would definitely recommend Weebly to most teachers.

Carly: Squarespace is the one I recommend because it’s hard to make it look not professional. Almost impossible. We do website audits in TMO where we have teachers drop their websites in, and then my husband and I look at them and tell them what they can fix, add, change their branding, or get photos. And it’s really fun. Yeah. I would say. We can always tell when it’s Wix or Squarespace because they always look, and we always go, wow, this looks so nice. Yeah. Because they just have a very modern approach. And while we’re on the topic, if teachers need any help with templates, I’ve created a course helping you build a website from the start.

So if you’ve never done one before or you have an old one that you’re like, I don’t even know how to make this look modern. Basically, what I’ve done is I’ve taken all my favorite piano teachers’ websites, Studied them and come up with templates for what works so a template for your home page like what should be on your home page and in what order what how can it be laid out and then your contact page and your about me page and what to share and not without writing a novel like I’m all about being concise and to the point and having headlines and good photography because The truth is when you’re recruiting students, they will land on your website and bounce if they get any kind of a vibe that it’s not updated.

Amy: Or not, just going to a website feels heavy. Yeah, it just feels like I don’t need time and paragraphs on your teaching philosophy. Just give me some short statements that help me understand music. Kids love or piano that, whatever. Just be very to the point.

Carly: Yes, exactly. And a lot of teachers just have no idea where to start with that. So it was a fun process. Creating a template so that they can do it without having to think too hard.

Amy: That sounds really useful.

Carly: It was fun. Okay, let’s talk about organization and daily workflow. We all have a lot of tasks. We wear a lot of different hats as teachers. As, yeah, as music teachers, as business owners. So you had mentioned browser extensions here. Do you want to go into that?

Amy: This is where I get to my happy place, actually, Carly. I’m actually currently doing a digital organization series with teachers that I offer online, and this is a lot of the kind of things that we talk about. So, browser extensions are little tools that you can add to your browser, with little functionalities tied to other programs.

So, one of my favorite browser extensions is LastPass. Which I assume you probably use. Nowadays, a lot of people use LastPass to manage their passwords. Evernote and Notion, which are both cloud-based daily captures, I call them types of programs, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a little bit. But each of those programs has what’s called a web clipper, which you use then to save things off the internet into that program.

With just one click, you can send all kinds of things, whether it’s a photo, a screenshot, a bookmark, a web page, whatever it may be. Grammarly, which again is another program similar to LastPass, is a password manager, but Grammarly is like your English teacher in your back pocket, grading all of your writing as you go along.

Grammarly has access to your browser if you allow it, and then it will show you as you’re typing, whatever webpage you’re on or whatever you’re doing, and it will make suggestions for you to improve your writing. Capital One shopping is like a money-saving browser extension. So whatever website that you’re on, if you’re buying something, whether it’s sheet music plus or Amazon or whatever, this will pop up, and it will do a scan for you and it’ll find all these codes online, and it will tell you if you have the best price basically or it will give you a lot of times it’ll just pull out a code and give you oh I thought I was only getting 10 percent off at sheet music plus but it found a code for 20 percent off. So that has been really useful. Sometimes it can be annoying because sometimes it pops up too much, but it’s worth saving money to have it anyway.

And then, finally, one browser extension that I use pretty frequently is an eye picker or a color picker. There’s a variety of ones that you can go into when looking for extensions on Chrome or whatever.

And what it does is it allows you to find a color. If you are maybe on a webpage and you’re like, Ooh, I really like that color. I want to use that in my website or my logo or my branding or whatever, but what color is that? What color scheme, it gives you the RGB or the color scheme numbers. I can’t remember what they’re called. And it will tell you exactly what that color is, and oh, I can’t tell you how many times I have used that.

Carly: Those are all so great, and we’ll have to list them out so that people can grab them. I know Grammarly has saved me too many typos. Yeah. Or adding a comma or a dash or whatever. Yeah. Grammarly is a no-brainer to have. I love that one.

Okay, so we have a couple of other things under daily workflow. I think one thing I want to mention is your time management, and I’m all about helping teachers manage their time. Still, some of those tips would be trying to batch what you do, and I teach a method for doing all of your lesson planning on one day of the month. A lot of teachers just laugh that you can’t do that, and then they come back to me a few months later, and they’re like, it was really hard at first, but once you get it everything organized. You actually can do it and it saves a lot of time. But finding ways to categorize your tasks and do them one day of the month or one day of the week if you need to versus just flying through a number of tasks every time, every day, or every, yeah, every time you sit down to do your tasks.

Another one we mentioned was cloud-based storage. I know Google Drive and Google Photos are favorites of mine. Are there any other cloud storages that you use or would recommend?

Amy: For the most part, I do use both of those a lot: Google Drive and Google Photos. I mostly use Google Drive when I’m sharing things with people, whether it’s Folders for my digital organization course or handouts for presentations I’m doing or something like that.

My husband is a techie, actually way more techie than I am. He’s a Salesforce developer, so he knows all the stuff. And he actually has us on our own cloud called Synology. So a lot of our actual files are saved there, which is supposed to be, it’s basically, it’s not backed up online with another company.

So we know that it’s safe and secure. So he likes using that. So a lot of our stuff is actually on that. Otherwise, as far as my business goes, I use Google Drive for a lot of things, and I use Google Photos as well. I like using albums and Google Photos and their facial recognition feature to view one student’s thing.

Like I can view all of my students in one place, like Abigail and all of her photos and videos. And, eric or whatever. So they have their own space, and I can share that with the families as well. And I can very easily go back and see, photos or videos from five years ago when they were first taking piano lessons, yes.

Carly: Oh, there are so many great tools and so many reasons to become a techie as a teacher.

Amy: It’s just a little by little, one thing at a time. It is. Yeah, it is, which is hard to do. It’s easy to feel very overwhelmed by it all.

Carly: It is. And I can think of one of our teachers who’s now like the best at all the tech things and even teaches others. But when she first joined, she was, she would tell everyone, I am a tech dinosaur. She didn’t even own a computer when the pandemic hit, and she had to go buy a Macbook. And now she’s Everyone, you can do it. It doesn’t, it’s not as hard as it looks, and she was so good at watching so many tutorials, and then she’d go YouTube stuff when she couldn’t figure it out and watch more.

Amy: It’s about being willing. Just be willing to realize, hey, this is hard for me, but I know that it’s something that can make life easier, and you just have to work at it, and little by little, every day, the more that you do, the easier that it gets.

Carly: Yes. One more thing I was thinking about is using YouTube with your students, and there are so many ways to utilize YouTube. It’s a free backup of your videos. You can actually re download videos from YouTube if you ever need them back and making them unlisted or public or private I would say use it to back up things, but also creating a channel for your students. So helping your student create their own YouTube channel is so amazing because they can then see their own progression. And it can be unlisted. So it doesn’t need to be, like privacy issues unless their parent doesn’t mind, but they can start uploading. I would recommend bideoing them in your studio, playing or online, playing their songs once they finish them. Then, they can upload them just from their phone to YouTube, and that way, they have a library of all the songs they’ve worked on that year.

Amy: That’s fun. I had not thought of that because I do use Google Photos in that way because you can create albums, and you can share the link in the same way where they can see everything, but that would include all of their photos as well as videos. Using a YouTube playlist allows them to have their own control, their own account. Yeah, YouTube, that’s more cool to share.

Carly: Yeah. And it’s introducing them to that creativity. Yeah, we’ve made this for you. You can write your own music. Yeah. So having them have their own channel just allows them to share it with their friends, or they can post those links on Facebook.They’re not usually on Facebook. They’re usually on Instagram. Yeah. But it just gives it, puts it in their hands.I think we’re almost ready to wrap up. We’ve had quite a bit, but let’s talk about social media scheduling and how teachers can take advantage of that.

Amy: I’ve worked my way through several different social media tools over the years. Buffer, which is good. Hootsuite, which is an old one, has been along for quite a while. I’m currently using Tailwind mostly because I was looking for something that I could easily schedule on Instagram, which also allowed me to post to Facebook. You know how Instagram has the whole one link that you can use in the bio? And I wanted a special link in bio that would allow me to not only just have buttons like link buttons, but I wanted to be able to link to an image. If I post an image in the feed and I could say, click on the image and then that would take you to that item.

And I just felt like I really liked the layout. It’s called smart. bio is what they use for tailwind. And so I’ve been using that and whatever social media scheduling tool you use, the nice thing about it, it’s a little bit of that batch processing thing that you were talking about where you can be like, okay, once a week I’m going to spend 30 minutes or an hour or whatever and I’ll do the same thing. I go into my photos, I download photos or find photos that I think would be great to share on social media. I’m not good about doing it every day because it just takes too much brain time to do that.

Carly: It does. And you’re not in the mode. Like I, that’s why I think batching, because you get in the mindset of billing or you can get in the mindset of marketing and get take, use your time the best you can while you’re in that frame of mind.

Amy: Yeah. So if you’re doing a social media scheduling tool, you just want to make sure that whatever you use, post to, whatever accounts. If you have just Facebook, then, Facebook has, you can do scheduling right on the business suite on Facebook. You’re going to have a special scheduling tool for that. If you’re using Instagram, excuse me, Instagram maybe Pinterest or anything like that, you can use a little bit more robust ones. Yeah. Like Tailwind. I know SmarterCue; I’ve been playing around in SmarterCue a little bit. That looks pretty fabulous.I’ve just been debating back and forth between those two. Yeah. What do you use?

Carly: Yeah. I have an assistant that helps me with a lot of social media stuff for Teach Music Online, and she loves Calendly. And because you’re already making your graphics in Calendly, and you can actually just, there’s a calendar directly in there where you. Not Calendly. Canva. Is that the same as a scheduling? Calendly. Calendly. Okay. Gosh, my words today. I don’t know where.

Amy: I was like, really? Calendly has social media schedules. LOL

Carly: No. Calendly is fantastic. That’s another resource we should mention. But. Yeah. Canva is where you’re creating your graphics. There’s a built-in calendar, so whatever graphic you can just assign it to your calendar, and you can do it to your Facebook or to Instagram. But, Honestly, Instagram now has scheduling built in. It didn’t used to. It’s new where you can actually schedule stuff in advance, whereas before, you had to use scheduling software; you just couldn’t do it through Instagram.

Amy: Interesting. I haven’t tried the Canva. I’m a huge Canva person. And I just haven’t gotten to that. Sometimes it’s funny because sometimes like when you’re using something that’s working really well for you, you don’t always need to go looking. And that’s a good thing. You don’t want to always feel like, Oh, here’s the latest greatest. I got to go. It’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by that. And even, I’ve been using Tailwind for a year, and I was like, finally, I’m set on something. This is what I’m going to use, and then I see Smarter Queue, and I’m like, Ooh. now I have to make a decision again, what do I do?

Carly: Decision fatigue.

Amy: It is. It is. It’s just that there are so many new things, but I think for a lot of teachers, Canva would be a really good solution.

Carly: Yeah. And it’s just included. If you’re paying for the pro account, I believe it’s just. Part of it. So you don’t have to pay extra for something else. So many ideas. So many wonderful things for teachers to think about. Thank you so much. There were more things I think we would like to talk about, but I think that was a lot and gave teachers enough to think about.

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Amy: Thanks to Carly for the invitation and for allowing me to share our chat here on the Piano Pantry podcast. If you’re new around here, each week I like to share one little random tip at the end of the episode. Today I wanted to challenge you to include in your morning routine just five minutes to do a quick run of a sweeper.

All that might mean is that in your studio you do a fast vacuum of your entryway rugs or the path to and the space around the piano. I love to run my Norwex dry mop around the vinyl flooring in my great room and kitchen every morning. It takes less than five minutes. You don’t have to be thorough. It’s amazing how just a light go over can make a difference in how clean a space feels.

Give it a try.