Student composers in Mexico

Hi everyone

I hope you are feeling well. As you know, we write some articles about schools around the world which use successfully Flat. Last few months, we shared with you different teachers testimonials: Mrs. Jehl who is encouraging collaboration between her students, Nicholas Conner who, thanks to Flat, brought creativity into his lessons, and Jordan Murdock who developed an interactive music program.

Today, a testimonial. We had the pleasure to meet Mr. Kyle Pape, music teacher at the American School Foundation in Mexico City. A special thank to him who took the time to have a nice chat with me.

The Classroom

The American School Foundation of Mexico City is an American international school founded in 1888.
Kyle Pape belongs to the new generation of music teachers. He graduated in 2014 at the University of Iowa in Music Education. He started to work as a Music Teacher at American School Foundation in 2014. He is the Upper School Music Teacher since June 2016. Kyle is also in charge of the Jazz Big Band and the composition class.
He discovered Flat thanks to Google, which proposed him to try Flat for this course, given that Flat is optimized for the G Suite for Education. Interested, he met us during the Midwest Conference in Chicago, where he was able to try the product and see the possibilities for his classes.

The Challenges

Kyle is a passionate music teacher. His first goal is to transmit his passion for music. He hopes that his students will become life-long musicians, even become a professional musician, who will continue their music studies at College. To achieve this aim, Kyle strives to give the best tools, resources to develop the knowledge, understanding, and creativity with his students regarding music.
In his transmission, he teaches music theory and music composition. However, work with paper is a slow process, and not very fun for the students. Another problematic was to encourage collaboration within the classroom. In his efforts to integrate digital tools into his classroom, Kyle tried some music notation software, and, given the user-friendly experience that Flat provide especially, he decided to integrate Flat into his classroom.

The Solutions

Kyle started online composing with Flat at the end of 2016. He discovered a tool which permits him to create scores, assign exercises and give instructions to his students.
Contrary to paper, "Flat permits to write quickly," Kyle told us. Indeed, Flat is user-friendly. The interface was designed to be intuitively used even by the youngest and the most beginning musicians. Moreover, recently, we have updated this interface for the teachers, to simplify their work and tasks. Kyle also uses Google Classroom. Given that Flat is fully-integrated to Google Classroom, thanks to our partnership with Google, that permits Kyle to keep his teaching habits. All these features allow Kyle to work more quickly in his composition classes.

With Flat, Kyle also found a solution to his collaborative's issue. He appreciates the possibility to see how his students work, what is great, what is wrong and gives immediate feedback. His students can annotate their music sheets and comment Kyle's remarks. These functionalities permit to improve the communication between him and his students. This aspect is important for Kyle, who is a teacher close to his students

"Flat permits to write quickly, to give immediate feedback to my students. Moreover, the combination of Flat with Google Classroom works very well."

The Changes

Kyle developed with Flat some exercises of improvisation/composition, which permit him to study and to put into practice his rhythm, reading, and writing lessons.
For example, he creates a bass line on Flat, and his students must compose their own melody with chords, following some rules. That permits Kyle to see if his students respected the key of the exercise in this kind of exercise. And evidently, everything works faster than work on paper.

After integrating Flat into his classroom, Kyle saw the impact on his students directly. Today, they compose and work on his exercises but also on their own compositions during their free time. "It is fun to see that," he told us. His students don't hesitate to request their teacher for some advice. A creative spirit developed into his classroom. "They can work easily and have a feedback immediately because of the playback function," Kyle told us.

Moreover, Kyle was also happy to see that they teach and learn from each other. They don't hesitate to collaborate together on their compositions and exercises, but also to explain how to use the different aspects of the program. The live collaboration on Flat enabled Kyle to create an effective collaborative environment in his classroom.

This is only the beginning for Kyle and the American School Foundation. We wish him all the best in continuing the great job he did for his music classes. Thanks a lot again to him, for his testimonial.

I hope you enjoyed this story, and you found it inspiring. If you know someone who uses successfully Flat in his classroom, or just for some feedback concerning the article, feel free to write us!

Have a beautiful day everyone!

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