If you have many students, it can be tricky to find the open time slots in your schedule. An easy way to use MTH to help you do this is to create a name that is just for your open times. Be sure when you create the imaginary students profile that you enter a $0.00 for the lesson cost and you leave the email address blank unless you want to receive daily reminders of all of your open time slots.

Create events for the open time slots and make them repeating events through the end of your semester or school year. Assign them to your imaginary student (or leave them as global events that students must register for) and title the event available (or something like that) When you need to find open time spots, simply change the view to the name of your imaginary student and you will be able to see all of the available lesson times.

When a student would like to register for that lesson time, simply change the name to that student and their lesson will be scheduled through the end of the school year. Once a student discontinues lessons simply change the lesson back to your imaginary student.

During the holiday season, teachers receive gifts from students, and the search engine can help you keep track of what you received from which student.

In the student lesson notes section, I write xmas-gift, followed by the gift received in the private notes section. If I just type xmas, a search will pull out any lesson notes with the word xmas in it. As some of my students learn Christmas music during this time of year, I have the word xmas in many lesson notes.

After the holidays are over, you can go to the Lesson History under the Lesson tab, and search for xmas-gifts. This search will give you a list of all the students that gave you a gift during the holidays. Quite helpful.

I also use this technique to enter particular grades, whether weekly, monthly or quarterly. I precede the grade with an astrick *. An example of a grade is *10. A search for * will pull up the student grades.

There are many uses for the search engine that will enable MTH to work even harder for you. On the bright side, you don’t have to give MTH a raise for taking on more responsibility and work.

What creative ways do you use for the search engine?

Scheduling students around my everyday activities was quite a chore, as I had to bounce back and forth from my Day Planner to the MTH Calendar when I was scheduling a student or makeup outside of the normal teaching hours. Then I had an IDEA! And it is working great. Music Teacher’s Helper is not just a studio manager, but also a personal manager.
I set my name up in MTH as an adult student and schedule other activities, such as personal and financial business, into the calendar of MTH. I can call up my name in the calendar and name the event that I am doing. Under categories, I created a personal, financial and a business category in different colors. Under location, I added Personal.

I can now enter a reoccurring event, such as MTH invoices sent, into the calendar using the financial category and studio location. Personal events can also be put in, so you won’t schedule a student during the personal event time. If I need a reminder, I can either enter it as an all day event, or give it a time of 12 a.m. for 5 minutes.
Every morning I receive an email from MTH and see the events for the day, including the personal appointments and tasks to do. When the task or appointment is done, I can check it off as reconciled.

I tossed my day planner and schedule all my appointments and reminders on MTH. Anyone interested in buying a used Day Planner?

I’ve seen many improvements in Music Teachers Helper in the past year, and the File Upload Area is one of them. Often, the improvements have clearly been in direct response to teacher suggestions. That’s one great thing about this service–your ideas are listened to.

I don’t know how many teachers requested the file upload area, but I know I was hoping for something of that kind, after I started emailing recordings to students (see A Great Teaching Tool from 10/28).

The File Upload area is a great idea with real potential. I haven’t had time to really work it into my routine yet, but if you haven’t tried it, let me tell you some of the ways you can use it to save time and provide more service and value to your students.

If you have used it, I’m probably not alone in wanting to hear from you about how you are using it, and how well it works for you. Just add a comment at the end of this article.

The Where and How of It

The File Area is on the submenu of the “Student” tab. That’s where you can upload a file for your students’ use, and it can be a word processing file, a picture, recording, movie, music software file, a PDF file–just about any kind of useful file to share.

You can either have the file available to everyone in the Resources of your home page, or you can select which of your students have access to it. They can get to it via their “Home” tab menu.

The Benefits

What’s great about this is that you can upload recordings, photos, sheet music, etc., and store it there. When it’s time for a student to have a copy of one of these, you can just add them to the list of those who can access that file. It can save on preparation for teaching, avoiding finding originals, making copies, and can make available materials such as recordings, photos or videos, that you probably wouldn’t give a student at a lesson.

It’s perfect for uploading class lists, handouts, and recordings–including (more…)

To help new users learn how to use Music Teacher’s Helper, and to help everyone learn the capabilities of the new invoicing system, we’ve added six video tutorials, which walk you through step-by-step how to perform all the major functions in Music Teacher’s Helper.

Here are the tutorials we’ve added:

• Overview of Music Teacher’s Helper
• Adding students to Your Account
• Using the Calendar
• Billing and Transactions
• Invoicing System

The videos are each between 5 and 11 minutes in length.

To watch the video tutorials, login to your account, and click the “Help” menu, then “Video Tutorials”.

Enjoy!

I’d like to call your attention to some very useful ideas about scheduling students using Music Teachers Helper; these ideas were suggested by Tina in response to my post a couple of weeks ago. Take a look at her comments at the end of that post, Tips for Easier Lesson Scheduling. She even has PDF examples of how she does it.

The basic idea is to add your own categories, such as “available”, “makeup lesson”, “group lesson”, or whatever you’d like to track or offer to students–and then color-code them to make them easier to see.

For example, I’ve taken to listing available lesson times (more…)

Many of you know that you can put announcements on your studio website. (After logging in, click Home -> My Studio Website -> Studio News / Announcements).

Up until now, announcements have always been sorted chronologically. But we have had so many requests from teachers wanting to be able to change the order of the announcements manually, that we have now made that possible!

When you add or edit an announcement, there is now a “Sort Order” option. Just enter a number. Higher numbers will cause the announcement to display higher in the list than other announcements, regardless of the date. If no sort order is specified, then they will continue being sorted chronologically.

We hope you all enjoy this new little feature!

One of the most important benefits of Music Teachers Helper (MTH) is that students can look up information at their convenience: they can look up online when their next lesson is, what they did in their last lesson, what their payment situation is–and if you wish, they can look up alternative lesson times in case they need to schedule a makeup.

At this time of year, teachers are scheduling lessons for the fall, and MTH can make that much easier. Who hasn’t had to play phone tag or use multiple emails to schedule a lesson?

I’ve tried a few different approaches with MTH. One was to create events on the calendar that were global, open to all, showing when there were available lesson times. This had the benefit of being easily accessible to students, but the drawback was that most students didn’t need this information very often, and it cluttered up their own calendar, making it harder to view their own lesson information.

What I do now (though we would all appreciate hearing from you about your own experiments–just add a comment at the end of this post) involves a fictitious student named “Just Visiting.”  It works well both for new students trying to schedule a first lesson, and for existing students needing to reschedule. (more…)

There are several teachers who, when they sign up for Music Teacher’s Helper, already have their own studio website, or at least own the domain name for their website. And because Music Teacher’s Helper gives them their own studio website, teachers are often faced with a choice of whether to use one or the other, or both. Take a look at our FAQ for some ways to help make the decision on which website to use:

www.musicteachershelper.com/faq#already-have-website

If you decide to get rid of your old website, but you’d like to keep your domain name (ie. www.yourname.com), you can (more…)

Many teachers who charge “per lesson” have requested the ability to schedule an event on the calendar that will be charged differently from a students regular lesson rate.

Before, you had to wait until the lesson was reconciled to change the cost. This caused problems when invoicing, for those who invoiced in advance, since the invoice was created before the cost could be changed.

Now you can set the cost of an event from the start! When creating a new event, there is now a “Cost” option that overrides any default costs for a student’s lesson.

This will make it much easier to create group events that aren’t charged, or to charge a recital fee to only those students who will attend the recital.

Thank you for all your feedback. You’re helping making Music Teacher’s Helper better all the time!