By Hermes Camacho
The Exhibition Floor at TMEA 2016
The Picardy team had another fantastic time at the Texas Music Educators Association convention down in San Antonio last weekend and received some valuable feedback and responses to our Picardy webapp. As musicians, we all know the importance of honing our ability to play our instrument. As teachers, we also know how vital a strong grounding in musicianship — which includes music theory, ear-training, and sight-singing — can mean for their students. That’s what we’re trying to provide at Picardy: a way for teachers to help their students take that step up to the next level. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s conference.
“We (band, orchestra, and choir directors) really want our students to improve their theory skills.” Teachers overwhelmingly understand the importance of a solid foundation of music theory skills, even well beyond the basic fundamentals. It just makes rehearsals and other musical collaborations more productive and meaningful.
“We (band, orchestra, and choir directors) really don’t have that much extra time, either in class or outside of class, to cover what the students need.” There’s the ideal situation and then there’s reality. Teachers want theory incorporated, but they’re already pulling 10+ work days, so where on earth are they going to find the time to plan, teach, and grade all the theory work? They want it to be meaningful and not just something that the students “sort of do”, but really something with which to engage.
“Hey, all this content looks great…but it’s a bit overboard for my middle schoolers and elementary aged kids.” We’ll be working on building out content that’s better suited for elementary students and a smaller subset better suited for the needs of most middle school kids. Sometimes there is such thing as too much of a good thing!
“Do they have to sign up with a Facebook or Google account?” Very soon, the answer to this will be, “nope.” We wanted to take advantage of the security and ease of use of both facebook and google authentication, but we’ll soon be rolling out a unique username and password option for those that want it to be customized to just Picardy. We’ll continue to encourage everyone to use Facebook and Google, but we’re happy to meet the needs of those who don’t use Google or Facebook.
“We really like that Picardy is accessible from most devices, include smartphones and tablets.” We wanted to make using Picardy as easily accessible as possible for everybody, which is why we really focused on making the interface useable on multiple screen sizes and device types. Most students especially have a smartphone with them almost all of the time and far more often than their laptop (if they have one).
We’re looking forward to our next show in New York in late April and to many TMEAs to come!