What's New in Flat for Education Before You Start the Year

If you only have ten minutes before rosters land, these are the Flat for Education updates worth knowing about, because most of them change what you can set up on day one.

The sight-reading generator grew up

The sight-reading generator got the update teachers asked for most: you now control the key and the time signature before an exercise is created. You can also create multi-band parts in one click!

That sounds small. It's the whole game. If you're teaching a unit in 6/8, you generate reading practice in 6/8 instead of hoping it turns up. Starting beginning band in flats? Set the key to B-flat and the exercise lands where your students actually are. The key options are major keys for now, so C, G, D, A, F, B-flat, and E-flat, plus Random. You can tick several keys or several meters at once and let the generator pick one at random each time, which is how you get a week of varied practice from one setup.

Two smaller changes you'll feel straight away. Exercises now open in horizontal Track View by default, so an exercise you throw on the projector is ready to read without switching from Page View first. And you can generate an exercise and attach it to a performance assignment in one step, instead of generating it, saving it, then hunting for it inside assignment creation.

How to build a term of sight-reading in five minutes

1. Open the Sight-Reading Generator from your tools page.
2. Pick the instrument, then set the difficulty level.
3. Set the time signature, then the key. Choose one of each, or select several and let the generator vary them.
4. Generate. The exercise opens in Track View, ready to display.
5. Attach it to a performance assignment, or send students to generate their own.

If you want the full assign-and-collect workflow, the step-by-step is in How to Generate and Assign Sight-Reading Exercises.

Students can now practise sight-reading on their own

This is the change that keeps working after the bell.

Until this summer, sight-reading was a teacher-only tool. Students saw an exercise when you assigned one, and that was it. Now students can open the generator from their own tools page and practise as much as they want, at their own level, without you generating or grading a thing.

Reps are the one thing a once-a-week classroom activity can't give them. A student who reads three fresh lines a night for a week comes back a noticeably more fluent reader. Point them at the generator in the first week, make it the standing "if you have five minutes" task, and you've built a habit that runs itself all year.

Free Record: collect the performances that never fit a score

Some playing just doesn't map to a single piece of sheet music. A brass quintet playing together. A guitar class where everyone prepared something different. An improvised solo over a backing track. Free Record is a performance assignment type built for exactly those.

Students record any playing, audio or video, with no score attached, and hand it straight in. Every submission lands in the same review screen as the rest of your assignments. It sits next to the classic score-based performance assignment, so you pick the mode that fits the task.

Where it earns its place is the assignments that were awkward or impossible before:

• Ensembles and small groups. A jazz combo or a choir sectional records one take you grade as a group, instead of eight separate part submissions.
• Mixed-repertoire playing tests. Set one assignment for the whole class and let each student record the piece they've prepared at their own level. No building thirty near-identical tasks.
• Improvisation. A solo over a backing track has no notation to play from, so a no-score recording is the natural fit.
• Chair auditions. Students submit their excerpt on video and you rank them on your own time, instead of losing rehearsals to live auditions.
• Differentiated classes. When a beginner and a near-portfolio player share a room, each records the repertoire that actually fits them.

The rule of thumb: if the piece is fixed, attach the score and students get the metronome and tuner in the workspace as they practise. If the performance is varied, improvised, or a group take, reach for Free Record.

Performance auto-grading, now in beta

Here's the one that gives you your evenings back, and it's rolling out this term.

You can now switch on auto-grading when you create a performance assignment, and choose how strict the analysis should be. When a student hands in a recording of the attached score, the engine listens and flags how closely the performance matched, so you're reviewing and confirming rather than marking every submission cold. You stay in control of the final grade. It just does the first pass for you.

This is in beta and being refined with teachers right now, so expect it to sharpen over the term. If you run a lot of scale checks or set-piece playing tests, it's worth turning on early and seeing how close its first pass gets to yours.

👉 If you are interested in trying out the beta, please email us at edu@flat.io

Import music from a PDF, or a photo

If you've ever retyped a piece into notation software because you only had a printout, this one saves you that hour.

The import flow was rebuilt on a new recognition engine over the summer, and it now takes more than PDFs. You can bring in a PDF, an image file, or a photo you scanned with a camera, and get editable notation you can transpose, adjust, and assign. Snap the octet arrangement from your filing cabinet, import it, clean it up, and it's ready for parts.

One note for your classes: in Flat for Education, this import is available to teachers and admins, not students. So it's a prep tool for you rather than something students trigger themselves.

Coming very soon: a cleaner editor toolbar

The editor your students write in is getting a tidy-up, and it's built to give assignments more room to breathe.

The changes are about layout, not relearning where everything lives. The tool tabs move to a vertical rail down the side, which frees up space for the extra tabs an assignment needs. Comments move into their own tab, so an assignment with a lot of feedback no longer pushes the score down the page every time you scroll. And instructions become detachable: they stay in the Assignment tab, but a student can pull them out and pin them next to the score, so the brief stays in view while they compose.

Coming very soon: the Flat for Education desktop app

One more that's almost here, so keep an eye out during the next weeks.

A desktop app for Flat for Education is on the way. It's the notation editor you already know, repackaged to run as an installed app, and it solves the two problems classrooms complain about most. It works offline, so students keep composing and editing even when the classroom Wi-Fi drops mid-lesson. And their work syncs across devices through their account, which matters when a student moves between a lab machine, a cart Chromebook, and a computer at home.

Two things to set expectations. At launch it's the notation editor only, so assignments still live in the browser. And it's an extra option, not a replacement: the web platform stays exactly where it is, and nobody has to download anything to keep working the way they do now.

Get set up before the rosters land

None of these updates need a rollout plan. Pick the one that fixes your biggest headache from last year, set it up in the first week, and let it earn its place. If you want a clean start, our 30-minute class setup guide walks you through classes, rosters, and your first assignment.

If you're not on Flat for Education yet, there's a free 30-day trial and setup takes a few minutes.