Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

As I was reading Martha Grondin’s excellent blog titled Artful, Tuneful, Beatful, I came across a post she wrote about a web-based notation tool called noteflight. This is a wonderful and free site that could be used for a class to compose a song or share a song with others so that numerous students from various schools could compose a song together.

Some of the benefits of noteflight:

• There are commands that are similar to those used in Finale or Sibelius, such as how to format a system break, delete a measure, save a file, etc.
• The magnifying tool is wonderful for younger elementary students because it makes the staff large so that they can easily place notes and spaces and lines.
• You can embed their compositions on a website, blog, wikispace, etc. Unfortunately, when I tried to embed one of my second grader’s compositions on this blog, it would not accept the embed code, but that is because I am lacking a plugin to do so. Therefore, noteflight also gives you the web address of your composition, so you can link it from your blog or webpage. This is an extremely helpful tool if you cannot embed items on your blog or school website.
• Entering notes is a very simple procedure. Press a letter on the computer’s keyboard, for example A, and it will appear on the staff. Then press the note value from the note value menu that will appear on screen.
• Saving a file is the same as saving a file with any program (Ctrl S or apple S). If your students forget to save, a message will appear reminding them to save.
• The Help menu is extremely helpful. It explains the application well so that you can easily maneuver it.
• The program saves various versions of your composition. Therefore, it can bring up a previous version of the composition at anytime. This is wonderful for a teacher because you can track the student’s progress and see how the composition was written. In addition, if you have a school brownout (this occurs too often when my students are on the computer composing), you can easily retrieve the earlier version of their composition so that they have not lost all of their work.
• Instruments: You can change the instrument sound.
• Key and time changes are possible.

Some items I would add to a wish list:

• It seems to only bring up a treble and bass clef staff together. I would love to see just a treble clef staff since my students are not learning bass clef just yet.
• If it could save your composition as a MIDI file, then I would feel like I found the free version of Finale NotePad (Finale NotePad is now $9.95).

Here is a link to one of my second grader’s compositions. This is a group of four students who were given a song that only had the note E. They were to use the computer’s arrow keys to change the notes to any note in a C Pentatonic Major Scale. They had a blast and many of them had no errors and achieved the goal of composing with the notes of a C Pentatonic Major Scale. I hope that you enjoy their composition!

I encourage you to check out noteflight. I feel that it is a great, free, web-based notation tool that could easily enhance any elementary music classroom.

If you have experience using this program, please leave me a comment!