Research has long established the benefits of being able to play a musical instrument, for children and adults alike. Often the support required to fulfill the role of a teacher and the importance of the needs of a teacher in the partnership is less appreciated. As the use of technology in music education continues to evolve, it is imperative that it meets the needs of both teachers and students. Thus far, today’s technology has fallen short, in recognizing the importance and benefits of facilitating a synergistic partnership and using that paradigm shift to shape the future of the landscape. Focusing on meeting the needs of just the student or teacher misses a huge opportunity, to create a much more efficient and personalized teaching and learning experience, that will transform the future of the 2 most important stakeholders, who undoubtedly are different sides of the same coin.
The development of MyTractice was born out of an understanding of, and desire to meet this need. Music education apps and or websites have thus far been created from a very narrow perspective, leaving a gap for a collaborative team environment that today’s social and technological world is ready and able to implement. One of the goals of the MyTractice platform is to move the narrative from the single, silo mentality that continues to shape the future of the landscape.
With creating a synergistic teacher and student relationship as a core principle that underpins everything we do, the first iteration of our mobile app provides some of the key and fundamental features necessary to meet the primary needs of both, the teacher’s desire and ability to efficiently deliver their teaching methods, to a broader audience if necessary and the students need for interaction, feedback and increased efficiency in how they approach learning.
So what is MyTractice and how have we worked to reach the goal of a collaborative technological space, that meets the music education industry’s needs? MyTractice provides a framework that facilitates the efficient management of music education, practice tracking, and analysis. It makes it easy to manage both the student and teacher’s needs. It focuses on fostering collaboration and efficiency across both parties so that no one is left without the necessary tools to achieve their musical goals. It allows teachers and students to interact and tailor their teaching or learning needs as a student develops their skill set.
We envision a future where teaching and learning to play a musical instrument is a completely personalized experience, tailored to how each mind learns best. MyTractice opens the gateway to a new, exciting, and more efficient reality, it will change how music teachers and students interact. The value and insights it provides will in time, eliminate many of the aspects of learning that have proved difficult to adequately measure and or understand the extent of their influence or impact on a student’s development. Additionally, long-standing frustrations largely centered around personal efficiency will no longer have to be an accepted part of the teaching and learning process. Some of the many ways in which MyTractice makes a real difference to this emerging frontier include
- It will enable education administrators create a more accurate baseline to facilitate better curriculum resource planning/management
- Provides a framework that enables you easily deliver any curriculum through a mobile platform
- Provides an innovative lesson/curriculum sharing, progress tracking, notification, and management system
- Enables you to easily and efficiently assess and assign a student or students to a level that reflects their ability on a program
- Allows a teacher to semi-automate a student’s progression through their curriculum
- Provides a teacher with various class/group practice metric insights, for up to 8 different instruments
- It provides a student with various practice matrices, a sense of structure, and evidence of continuity that helps reinforce self-discipline
- Helps develop less consciousness about being recorded
- Dynamically tracks a student’s practice time for up to 5 different instruments
- Facilitates real-time feedback from your teacher
- Helps accelerate the pace at which you internalize what you’re learning
- Enables you to easily refer to your practice notes or tag them as specifically or generally significant
- Enables you to easily set or change your practice goal and view how you are performing against them
- Enables you to set a date and time to listen back to a practice or jam session recording
- It will enable band Leaders to better and easily coordinate and communicate all their activities with band members
- Provides a repository (My Library) for your various forms of data
- Provides extrinsic motivation through a peer performance leaderboard