Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

In an earlier post I mentioned the request for instructors to have (access to) laptops. Our coordinator, Peter Antonelli, asked any of us who already use laptops in lessons for a description of use in order to weigh up the case for provision. I posted a description of my own use here.

At Tuesday’s In Service, Peter proudly unveiled six shiny new HP laptops all pre-loaded with a suite of life-enhancing programs: Sibelius (score writing software); MS Word; Excel; Filemaker; iTunes; Acrobat Reader and many more. One laptop will be allocated to each of the authority’s six secondary schools. While the dream of many instructors was to have one each for use in lessons, and perhaps to take home for preparation, this is certainly a very good beginning. Those of us who already use their own laptops may well continue to do so rather than gamble on a shared one being free at any given moment (most days there are three instructors in school on the same day). This should shorten the queue for others.

Peter asked me to go over a couple of quick Sibelius features and we spent around 20 minutes learning:

• How to convert a score into a series of midi files at a variety of speeds for graded pupil practise
• How to import musical examples from Sibelius into a MS Word file for the creation of worksheets, revision, tests etc. (this lovely little shortcut courtesy of Elsie Orr of Knox Academy Music Department)

The latter of these features was always possible but extremely time consuming and there was a hit or miss feel about the finished result. Now, select/copy/paste/resize is relatively intuitive and takes around 30 seconds per example. This is the format I plan to use for the long-awaited glossary of technical concepts.

As familiarity with Sibelius in the service ranges from beginner to professional levels, there may be the opportunity for me to deliver some differentiated in service training in the future.