SmartMusic has come a long way since its humble (and occasionally buggy) beginnings so many years ago. The newest version of SmartMusic Studio (SmartMusic 2010) is an exponential leap forward in convenience, not just from the early versions, but even from the more recent
version 10.2. MakeMusic has finally taken many of the requests of teachers and fixed most of the major annoyances that once made SmartMusic a labor of love to use. SmartMusic 2010 is far more user friendly and some of the improvements they have made to the user interface are game changers in terms of convenience and ease of use for classroom based music teachers.
Educational Articles
Having the opportunity to review a new piece of software is always fun, and even more so when it is one that until recently I had never even heard of. We have all heard the names of other music notation programs, but as educators I would bet that few have heard of a product called Notion, at least until now. The newest version of the Notion music notation software has just been released and while it may not sit on the high pedestal with names like Sibelius and Finale, they definitely need to move over and make some room for the new kid on the block..jpg)
I recently received a question asking how to move music back and forth from Sibelius to Finale. I too have this problem quite often as almost all of my old lessons and beginner music that I wrote out for my classes was done in Sibelius but now I would also like to be able to use it with SmartMusic (which requires Finale to create custom arrangements). Since neither company wants to allow the other to begin reading and writing their own proprietary formats, the grand dream of one day having an open, comprehensive transportable music file format is probably never going to happen. For now there is a format called 
I recently received a question in my mailbox from a reader of my weekly music education newsletter and thought it would be a good one to share with everyone. The question asked which interactive whiteboard I would buy (SmartBoard, ActivBoard, StarBoard, Mimio, etc.) if I had the money to do so. He went on to say it was for a 7th grade music classroom. Read on for my personal take on the whole thing.
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In going through my email I came across some information about some new gadgets over at the McCormick's music web site. I never found the gadget I was looking for but I did find a really useful page of PDF links to articles on a lot of very informative music technology topics. On their 
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