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Flat
Pros: Flexible features. Great on-screen guidance. Easy quiz creation.
Cons: Limited built-in content about music theory and technique. Auto-grading could use more feedback.
Bottom Line: This digital companion for in-person music study is an excellent tool for beginners and pros alike.
Register for a free account to test out the features, and choose which subscription setup fits your needs. Use the assignment tool to create your own scores and multiple-choice quizzes and customize the content for its scope and level of difficulty. Use the built-in grading tools to assign activities to your students and automatically score their quizzes. Or, encourage students to use the recording tool to capture their performances of an assigned piece so that you can offer timely, one-on-one feedback. Use the composition assignments as a tool for ear training: Ask students to find mistakes in rhythm, pitch, or dynamics in a score, or ask students to listen to a score and identify intervals. For assignments where students create their own compositions, use Flat as a one-stop shop for having students create, submit, and share their work. Consider using the collaboration tools to have students work on scores together, collaborating with you or with each other. Encourage students to experiment with new arrangements of pieces you're working on in class, or encourage students to work together on new arrangements and then record their own performances.
Flat for Education is a web-based tool for supporting in-person music education. Teachers can create an account and start exploring the features, creating assignments, and uploading MIDI and WAV files. Teachers can use the Assignments feature to generate a few different types of activities. First, there are worksheet assignments, which are automatically graded multiple-choice quizzes where students identify pitches, scales, intervals, chords, key signatures, and rhythms. Second, there are composition assignments, where students upload, edit, or annotate a musical score. Finally, there are performance assignments, where students upload recordings of themselves singing or playing music. Teachers can create and modify these assignments and submit feedback to students.
Since Flat is browser- and cloud-based, students can start using the site on one device and continue on another with all updates synced. There are integrations with tons of LMS tools like Google Classroom, Canvas, Microsoft Teams, Schoology, Moodle, and more.
The regular consumer version of Flat can be used for free, but the special Flat for Education features may be a better fit for most teachers. Pricing models start at $2 per student per year for a minimum of 50 students; larger schools or districts can contact the developer for pricing.
With tons of powerful features and lots of ways to customize your experience, Flat is a terrific tool to support students taking in-person music classes. The quiz feature is especially helpful. It's great to have a way to quickly generate quizzes to help students solidify their understanding of key concepts about pitches, rhythms, and scales, and key signatures. The flexible built-in composing tools are a breeze to use, too. It's refreshing to find a music tool that works as well with a MIDI keyboard as it does with an on-screen keyboard and point-and-click features for adding notes and rests on a staff.
The only real drawback to Flat for Education is that there's little instructional content built in. This tool is clearly built to supplement high-quality, in-person music education, and it's terrific that there are so many open-ended ways for teachers to construct assignments and offer feedback on their students' work. Still, some of the multiple-choice questions could come with a bit more feedback. It would be helpful if there was a way for students to review what they got right and wrong on a quiz and see some feedback on the correct answers. It's great that teachers can customize feedback on all of their assignments, but adding a few more built-in responses would be a welcome improvement, even if that means simple one-sentence phrases like "Remember, the key of G has one sharp." That small point aside, Flat for Education is a standout tool for music education and is an excellent digital companion for in-person music study.
Learning Rating
Overall this app is a great tool for students to compose music and collaborate with each other to create beautiful music!
My overall opinion of this website is that it is a good practice tool. All though this website will not provide additional information on composition, it is a great tool for students to implement what they know. I enjoy the collaborative aspect in that it works in the same way a google doc. works which is in real time. Students may be more comfortable with this considering Google docs is a popular platform for collaborative work. On the SAMR scale of technology this is an augmentation but could be considered a modification because it would not be possible to play back the instrumentation without the technology. This website allows students to use their creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking skills to work together to create music.
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