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Hear from Amy and seven other teacher friends on what their lesson assignment life has been like after the shutdown of Tonara one year ago.
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Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
Episode 085 – Tonara Transitions: A Special Teacher Talk
Episode 086 – On Assignments and Lesson Planning
Lesson Planning: A King-Size Master Spreadsheet
Transcript
Hey there! Amy Chaplin – host and producer of this podcast here. No matter how long I’ve been teaching, I think I will always enjoy hearing other teachers share what works for them, whether it be business management tools, group-class activities, ways to make technical patterns more fun, or how to lesson plans and give assignments.
I frequently hear the exact same sentiments from you as well – that you just love hearing teachers talk about the way they do things – even if it doesn’t end up being the right thing for you.
It’s been almost one year since shockwaves spread throughout the piano teacher community when Tonara – one of the first truly dedicated online assignment apps – closed its doors. One of the reasons I think this was so shocking was because Tonara launched just in time to literally save the sanity of independent teacher world when Covid hit.
Knowing that the news of their shutdown had the power to be panic-inducing as the school year was just kicking off, I threw together a last-minute podcast episode where you got to hear directly from 7 teachers on how they were feeling and handling the transition.
Thanks to a teacher friend’s suggestion, I’m really excited to bring you an update from those same teachers one year later. If you’re interested in listening to last year’s episode, first head back to number 85, Tonara Transitions: A Special Teacher Talk. Episode #86 also covers a lot of options for giving assignments and lesson planning if you’re interested in a deeper dive into that topic.
This podcast is ad-free, thanks to the support of teachers like you. If you value this content, please consider joining me on Patreon, where you can make a big difference in the life of this podcast as a silent partner for just $4 a month.
If you would like to get a few extras from me while still saying thanks for this podcast, for just $3 more – that’s right, only $3 more – you can become a Piano Pantry Insider.
As we come into the new school year, Insiders will receive even more good stuff, including tiny, easily digestible tips from me sent to you on a regular basis, weekly power hours, including one per month focused on email, and a quarterly presentations. All content is available for replay at any time.
I’m especially excited about all the great tips I have to share, and I already have a stockpile waiting to go. These will be really short snippets similar to what you’ve heard before on this podcast in past years.
At only $7, it takes a lot of teacher friends to back the work happening here. I’d like to give a special huge thanks to Marian Pease and Laura Cardin for their already ongoing support.
Visit PianoPantry.com/patreon or just search for Piano Pantry directly on Patreon.
Before I hand things over to my friends, I thought it would be fair that I also share what things look like in my corner on this topic.
I was pretty quick to jump with Nicola Cantan’s new at the time app called Vivid Practice for a couple of reasons. One, I liked the simplicity and non-gamification of the app, and two, I trusted Nicola to produce a product that would be well-supported and transparent – which it has been.
As I suspected, the transition out of Tonara was enough that some students who used to be dedicated to Tonara didn’t end up making the transition into the new tool very well. Some of it was that the students were getting older and just didn’t need it, and some of it was just getting people used to a new routine and learning how to use a different tool.
I am actually OK with only having a small handful of students on a practice app because putting assignments into a practice app – even with repertoire databases – can still take a bit of time. I also use a big spreadsheet for tracking my own lesson planning and just a lot of post-its for assignments and lesson notes directly on the music so I don’t necessarily need it for my own lesson planning or tracking assignment history.
I do emphasize use of the app for my beginners as I give a lot of listening assignments of pieces they will learn in the next few weeks as well as singing songs and echo patterns tracks from the Music Moves for Piano series. I also like having the ability to attach a recording of a piece for older students who might want to have a listen during the week.
Hello friends! This is Marissa, a piano teacher in Ohio.
So…we survived! It was so sad to say goodbye to Tonara. After much deliberation—and denial—I ended up switching to Practice Space. The transfer of saved assignments was truly painless, and the learning curve to use the program was only mildly frustrating, in hindsight.
The creators have worked hard to implement updates with missing features from the beginning and are responsive to requests for support. My studio families all switched over without issue, making me wonder what I was so worried about in the first place.
Every once in a while, though, my students or I will accidentally still say “Tonara” when talking about our new online practice platform and catch ourselves sighing wistfully.
Hey there, teacher friends. I’m Daniel Light. I have a studio of about 40 piano students in Louisville, Kentucky.
When we heard last September that Tonara would be closing down, I knew I wanted to find an app to replace it, and I wanted to make the move quickly so that I could save as much assignment history as possible in the new app.
I preferred an app that didn’t offer any kind of gamification. I just wanted a reliable assignment delivery system. I continue to be completely happy with my choice of the Vivid Practice app.
There are lots of things about the app that I appreciate. One is that it’s deliberately designed to require as few clicks as possible from a teacher during a lesson. Nicola Cantan, the creator of the app, is also a piano teacher, and has made a point to create a very streamlined process for using the app.
I also love that I can create a spreadsheet of assignments for any book that I teach from and upload those assignments in bulk. Coming soon, the app will offer pre-built assignments for most of the major piano methods.
When I’m teaching, I model for students in every single lesson exactly how I want them to use the practice app at home. I put my iPad right on the piano’s music rack and have each student log in to Vivid Practice before the lesson begins. Their profile data is saved on my device, so it’s just a matter of two clicks to switch from one student to the next.
With the list of assignments in front of us, I often let students choose how they would like to proceed through the lesson. I always ask them to open each individual assignment so they can read my complete instructions (which, by the way, I keep very brief).
By now, students just know what to do with the app when they sit down at my piano, and I’m always hopeful that the process we use in lessons transfers to how students practice at home.
I look forward to hearing about other teachers’ experiences with practice apps in this past year.
Hi again! I’m Florence, a teacher from Pennsylvania. I have a little larger studio of over 160 students and about 8 teachers.
Last year we chose My Music Staff for our entire studio to use for attendance, scheduling, practice logging and invoicing, among other things.
We had previously used the Square App, and to be honest, it was a bit of a rough transition at the start. Sales and auto-pay were slightly harder to navigate, and parents had to get used to the parent portal site. We managed to adapt, though, and we settled in as the year went on.
We also decided to stick with My Music Staff for the upcoming school year and other years for the specific music studio features that it offers. Some of the highlights were efficient scheduling for both teachers and students and attendance-taking features. Teachers can see at a quick glance their lessons taught, student information, and payments received. The platform offers easy communication between teachers, students, and the studio as well. A little perk I personally enjoyed was the way student birthdays were automatically put in the calendar and sent a little birthday wish from the studio on the morning of their birthday. We have been able to manage payroll, expenses, repertoire lists, a lending library, and even birthdays on My Music Staff. Overall, it has been a very good first experience for our first year.
Hello fellow piano teachers, I’m Lizbeth Atkinson and have been teaching in a private studio for 35 years. I teach 16 students in Columbus, Ohio via zoom and just moved to Marietta, OH where I hope to have about 16 more students in person.
I love technology and have been waiting for the perfect app to transition my students over to after having used Excel spreadsheets for weekly assignments and printing them out. Several years ago, I discovered the Practice Space App and it is everything I have been wanting. There is a dedicated teacher app AND a dedicated student app that work seamlessly together. You can create and save assignments, save any number of documents, videos, audio, and type as much as you want with font options. The app keeps track of students’ practice times and what they practice. Students can rate themselves and earn rewards.
Practice Space added a messaging feature where students can contact me directly from the app with questions they may have, and they can attach videos to their messages. I added students and assignments gradually over time and then had one week in which students brought their iPads or phones to the lesson and demonstrated how to use it. This extra step really helped, as some students needed a live demonstration. The team at Practice Space gave me a free one-on-one consultation to get it set up and answer any questions. They are fantastic at answering emails and updating the app with teacher requests. It is also cost-effective! This app has helped me transition to a paperless studio and made my life, my students’ lives, and parents’ lives 100% better!
Here is a quote from one of my current parents:
“Practice Space has been a godsend for this mom overseeing three boys’ daily practice. Before Practice Space we had books, sheet music and worksheets all over the piano! I would have to print things, and we never had everything in the correct “space.” Now my boys have everything they need right on hand and don’t have to ask me for help. They can chat back and forth with their teacher, Watch reminder videos and practice with everything they need in one place! They know exactly what is required of them and are so much more independent. Practice Space has helped to take this mom out of the mix during practice time and put the responsibility on the students. High praise from this busy mom…10/10!” – Lindsay Mentel
Hey, Anna Fagan here. I’m originally from Florida and currently in Tennessee.
I am weighing in on the practice app that I have been using for almost a year now, since Tonara went away. I decided to go with the Vivid Practice app because I have been part of Nicola Cantan’s Vibrant Music Teaching community for a number of years and had actually read about her new app within a week, I guess, of when Tonara announced that they were going to be going away.
I was really happy that they were able to work together and I could move a lot of the assignments (I guess all of the assignments I had in Tonara), I was able to move over to Vivid, which saved me just countless hours in having to re input all of that information.
Things I love about Vivid Practice are the practice types. Although, of course, students are still somewhat reluctant to use the app as much as I would like them to, I am continuing to encourage them to practice differently.
I love that you can send a PDF of the assignment. I have several students who prefer working with a printed assignment, rather than looking at the app all the time.
I actually love that they don’t give points for practice. I don’t like the competitive aspect of Tonara so I’m happy that that’s not even an option with Vivid. It does however, track the number of minutes the app is open and they do offer some analytics that are somewhat helpful so I can see the different types of practice that students are doing.
Things I was looking for specifically – coordinating communication between lessons – that’s been great with vivid practice. Audio recordings are still a little clunky. Students can send me videos, but. It is somewhat difficult for them to send me audio recordings. We’re working with that.
I love the responsiveness when I report a bug in the program. I love that they are constantly considering teachers suggestions and a couple times a year they will publish roadmaps of the things that they are looking to improve and add to the app. And let us know kind of when we might be able to see those things happening.
Things I don’t like. Students cannot access Vivid Practice from a laptop. This is mostly troublesome for me in that I keep the lesson links in, Vivid and my students that are using a laptop can’t access that. That’s a little troublesome. And really that’s about the only complaint I have with it at the moment. Very happy with Vivid Practice.
Hi, this is Elizabeth Davis Everhart, a piano teacher in Savannah, Georgia. And I am still using Google Classroom to help my students with their practice assignments and share videos and things with them. We still love it. It’s super accessible for everyone. Parents and students alike find it very easy to use and nothing confusing about the formatting or logging in.
And parents especially love that their kids can directly click on links to things like boom cards or YouTube videos, anything I might upload for them on Google Drive. is automatically integrated since it’s Google. And it’s really nice that it’s completely free to use. So I will still continue to use it.
Um, this year I have more heavily utilized the stream feature, which allows me to share announcements with my whole studio and they get in a text or email immediately that I have set something. So if there’s a weather alert, if my internet is down, you know, if I want to share holiday greetings or games or activities or YouTube videos, It’s so easy to share it with the whole studio.
So this is what I am continuing to use for now because it’s still working great for us.
Hi, my name is Valerie Merrell, and I am a piano teacher from Indiana. I had been a Tonara user, and when Tonara announced it was shutting down, I took my time doing research among other similar student lesson management options.
I particularly wanted the following features:
- A place to house weekly assignments that both the student and I can access and, as part of that, a place to house my library of often-used assignments, complete with associated recordings
- An EASY way to print those weekly assignments for students who will not check the app at home
- A communication tool with my students, where they can ask a question mid-week and not have to wait until their next lesson for a simple answer. (Sidenote here: I have a time earmarked several days a week to check these messages and respond, and it never takes me more than 1-2 minutes, if that), and finally…
- When a student needs to miss a lesson, I wanted a platform area where I could record a short instructional video and add additional content during that student’s lesson time, providing value during their lesson time without needing to reschedule the lesson.
I trialed Vivid and one other option with students, after which I went with Vivid for a couple of reasons:
- It had less distractions for students. They were able to more easily figure out how to accomplish what they wanted to do or what I was asking them to do.
- The creator, Nicola Canton, does such quality work that I had full confidence in the continued development of this program.
And the result?
I have been very happy with it! It has met my original requirements and has exceeded them. It’s also exceeded my expectations in other areas. The developers continue to add features at teachers’ requests, and I feel confident this is a program I will use long-term.
Once again, a big thanks to Marissa, Daniel, Florence, Lizbeth, Anna, Elizabeth, and Valerie for taking the time to share on this podcast. I truly believe we are all better together.
If you want to keep up with all that’s available to you on PianoPantry.com and the life of this piano teacher, join my email list at PianoPanty.com/subscribe
Save the date for the upcoming Organize Your Life with Notion Workshop my friend Joy Morin and I are putting on. It will be held Friday and Saturday September 20-21 from 10am-1pm Eastern Time. A bonus follow-up will be on Friday, October 11 from 2-3pm. Registration coming soon.
Don’t forget, links to everything you hear about on this podcast as well as a full transcript can be found at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode132
