We’re constantly adding improvements and enhancements to Music Teacher’s Helper, based on the requests of teachers like you. This month mostly consists of smaller improvements, in contrast to last month’s gigantic studio website overhaul, allowing you to add unlimited pages to your studio website. But there have been some useful improvements.

Competitions and Festivals: Repertoire Tracker Improvement

The most helpful improvement is probably the change we made to the Repertoire Tracker. We added two new options to the Repertoire Tracker which will help those of you who involve your students in competitions or festivals. (more…)

Are you looking for a little extra cash, a free Music Teacher’s Helper subscription for your own studio, and the opportunity to be part of the Music Teacher’s Helper team, helping other teachers make the most of their experience with Music Teacher’s Helper?

Music Teacher’s Helper has been around for about five years, and is growing quickly as more and more teachers learn about how powerful of a studio management tool it is.

Therefore, we are looking to expand our customer service team to provide more timely and efficient answers to the emailed questions that come in from teachers who use Music Teacher’s Helper.

However, this is different from your typical customer service “job”. (more…)

We’ve heard some teachers mention that the video tutorials contain sporadic garbled sounds, as if Alvin and the Chipmunks had invaded the video. We found that the problem was related to the latest Flash 9 player and how it works with the software we used to create the videos.

Fortunately, we were able to find a solution to the problem and have corrected the videos to work with the new Flash player. So if you tried to watch one of the videos and it was garbled, try again, and it should come through clearly. Also, we created a new Overview tutorial that covers the basic features of Music Teacher’s Helper a little more thoroughly.

In fact, here’s a link to it if you’d like to watch:

http://www.musicteachershelper.com/video-overview

Let us know what you think!

The Music Teachers National Association is holding a music teachers conference in Denver, Colorado from March 28 - April 1, 2008. Music Teacher’s Helper will be there and we’ll also be doing a showcase presentation on Tuesday.

If you’re coming to the conference, please stop by our booth (#110) and bring your friends. We’d love to meet you face to face.

You can read more about the conference here:

https://members.mtna.org/Conference2008/index.html

Hope to see you there!

Yay!! We have just released two new themes (layouts) you can use on your studio website! One is a “nature/leaves” theme with handwritten music manuscript in the background. The other is a “sky/clouds” theme (nothing to do with music really, unless you think of it as pointing you heavenward).

Here are some samples. To change your studio website theme, login to your Music Teacher’s Helper account, and click Home -> My Studio Website -> Website Layout / Theme

This feature has been long-awaited by many of you, and has been one of our most oft-requested features. The Studio Website you get with Music Teacher’s Helper used to have fixed pages, meaning you couldn’t change what showed in the menu, or add additional pages to your site. This was somewhat inhibiting if teachers wanted to put more on their website than their teaching policy and a little about their studio, because they had to either cram it all into either of those two pages, or not include it at all.

Well, now you can add your own pages to your studio website! You can have as many pages as you like and can even disable the system pages such as the photo gallery, student registration page, contact page, login page, and resources page if you decide not to use some of those options. You can also rename the menu items to whatever you want, and change their order in the menu. Some ideas for pages you can create are:

• A page describing your rates and fee structure
• If you perform, a page advertising your services or describing what you do
• A showcase page where you highlight a particular student or composer - you can change it as frequently as you want
• A testimonials page with quotes from your students about your teaching ability
• Embed a YouTube video of a famous performance
• The possibilities are limited only by your imagination (more…)

Here is the monthly list of the improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since January 14, 2008.

- Send to multiple email addresses per person. This feature has been requested so frequently, I know many of you will be happy about this. Some families have situations where there is a divorce, or even where each parent has their own email address they both want email reminders and invoices. Now Music Teacher’s Helper will allow you to enter multiple email addresses for a parent. In the Email field in the student (or parent) profile, just separate the email addresses with a semicolon. For example: john@google.com; jane@google.com. Then when email reminders, or invoices, or any email is sent to that person, the message will go to both addresses. (more…)

Here are the updates and improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since December 10, 2007. These include bug fixes, new features, and usability enhancements.

• Added a Mileage Tracker so you can track how far you’ve traveled in your music business. This is great for tax purposes. You can access the Mileage Tracker from Billing -> Mileage Tracker.
• The cost of a lesson or event will now show in event details when hovering over events on the calendar (if the cost is greater than 0)
• Made lending library items become overdue the day AFTER they are due, rather than the same day. They will also be marked overdue at the appropriate time according to your time zone, now, rather than the server time. Lent items now also show in order with the longest overdue items first. (or the ones that will be due back the soonest)
• You can now delete auto invoicing schedules, rather than just deactivate them
• Added a new drop down calendar for the date picker, so it will work better with Internet Explorer 7
• Your email history now shows the content of the message you sent, not just the subject and who you sent to. (more…)

Here is a list of the updates and improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since November 12, 2007.

• When updating repeating events on the calendar, we made a change that solves two issues. One is if you deleted an event in the future, say, for a holiday, it used to add the lesson on that day back in when you updated all the events in that repeat group. Now it will leave your deleted events as deleted so you don’t have to put the holidays in again. The second thing this improves is if you’re updating events that have already been invoiced, it used to make the event appear as if it hadn’t been invoiced (kind of like “Un-invoicing” the event), if you were updating multiple events at once (future or all). This has now been fixed, so that once an event has been invoiced, it will always appear invoiced. (unless you delete and recreate it).
• Fixed calendar updating repeat events bug caused by above change. If you changed the time of an event back to the past, there were a few days when this caused the event to be saved at the wrong time. This was quickly fixed as soon as it was discovered.
• Made auto event reminders only send notice to teacher if there were reminders sent out (rather than daily regardless of whether any were sent). We’re trying to cut down on your junk mail.
• Fixed print link on invoice creation screen.
• Now you can view daily summaries for past dates. It will show all events except cancelled events.
• Made automatic lesson reminder emails notification to the teacher show the lessons in chronological order.
• The cost of a lesson or event will now show in event details when hovering over events on the calendar (if the cost is greater than 0)

We have a lot more great features and improvements planned that we’re sure you’re going to love (since we’ve had so many requests for them). So stay tuned!

We’ve recently had several talented individuals join the team at Music Teacher’s Helper blog. We thought it would be a good time to introduce everybody to them, so you can put a face with the posts you read. Here we are - the old faces as well as the new (and some without faces because don’t have pictures yet).

Brandon Pearce

Brandon Pearce is a piano teacher, choral director, computer programmer, and entrepreneur from Murray, Utah, and is also the creator of Music Teacher’s Helper. As his teaching studio grew, he found it increasingly difficult to keep track of how much each student owed. Having recently received a B.S. in Computer Science from Weber State University, he decided to write a web-based computer program to manage billing and scheduling in his studio. Realizing that he wasn’t alone in his studio management frustrations, he soon made the service available to other teachers. And they loved it! Since 2003, several additional programmers, and hundreds of teachers from around the world have participated in creating the world-class studio management software you know today as Music Teacher’s Helper.

Brandon currently spends his time managing and improving Music Teacher’s Helper, as well as doing freelance web design for other individuals and businesses. He has cut his studio down to 1 student (his wife), but still enjoys playing the piano, singing, and arranging/composing when he gets the chance. He is also the assistant director of the Oratorio Society of Utah, a 90+ year old choral organization that performs Handle’s Messiah each year, as well as other choral masterworks.

Ed Pearlman

Ed Pearlman studied with members of the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and performed in the Yale Symphony and the Boston Philharmonic (a quality but nonprofessional orchestra). He continued his interest (more…)